By HELENE COOPER and MICHAEL R. GORDON AUG. 21, 2014
The New York Times
Background on ISIS, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Video Credit By Christian Roman on Publish Date June 30, 2014. Image Credit Reuters
WASHINGTON — The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria cannot be defeated unless the United States or its allies take on the Sunni militancy in Syria, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said Thursday afternoon.
“This is an organization that has an apocalyptic end-of-days strategic vision that will eventually have to be defeated,” the chairman, Gen. Martin Dempsey, said in his most expansive public remarks on the crisis since American airstrikes began in Iraq. “Can they be defeated without addressing that part of the organization that resides in Syria? The answer is no.”
But both General Dempsey and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, who appeared beside him during a Pentagon news conference, deflected questions about whether the United States military would pursue the Sunni militants from Iraq into Syria, an issue that many defense experts say lies at the heart any attempt to defeat ISIS.
Pressed about whether the United States would attempt airstrikes on ISIS targets in Syria, Mr. Hagel said, “We’re looking at all options.” And General Dempsey said that American allies in the region must play a role as well.
Interactive Graphic
A Rogue State Along Two Rivers The victories gained by the militant group calling itself the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria were built on months of maneuvering along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.
Earlier in the day, the Pentagon announced that American warplanes had conducted six more strikes on ISIS targets in the vicinity of the Mosul Dam in Iraq, destroying three Humvees, another vehicle and several roadside bomb emplacements. The ISIS fighters are a highly mobile force that may number as many as 17,000 men and can move across the Iraq-Syria border with impunity, according to American military and civilian officials.
The latest attacks brought to 90 the number of airstrikes conducted by the fighter jets, drones and bombers that the United States has unleashed on the Sunni militants since President Obama authorized the strikes as part of the battle against ISIS. There have been 20 attacks since the militants beheaded an American journalist and threatened to behead others if the United States did not stop the airstrikes.
President Obama has harshly condemned the slaying and Secretary of State John Kerry issued a statement declaring the group “must be destroyed.”
Thus far, though, Mr. Obama’s military strategy is aimed at containing ISIS rather than defeating it, according to Defense Department officials and military experts.
Wary of expanding the American military campaign in Iraq, the administration has balked at committing more extensive air power as part of a strategy that could decisively roll back ISIS.
The abilities of the Iraqi and Kurdish forces facing ISIS fighters remain limited, and similar shortfalls are seen in the moderate Syrian opposition facing ISIS across the border.
Some American experts believe it will be impossible to deliver a decisive blow against the militant group without attacking its operations in Syria. American officials said that the United States was conducting reconnaissance over Syria, but that attacks by drones or manned strike aircraft on ISIS positions in Syria had not been ordered. The president sent a Special Operations team into Syria last month in a vain effort to rescue hostages held by ISIS.
Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story “You can hit ISIS on one side of a border that essentially no longer exists, and it will scurry across, as it may have already,” said Brian Katulis, a national security expert with the Center for American Progress, a Washington think tank with close ties to the White House.
Another step that some experts say will be needed to challenge the militant groups is a stepped up program to train, advise and equip the moderate opposition in Syria as well as Kurdish and government forces in Iraq.
As proven during the initial American military mission to route Al Qaeda and the Taliban from Afghanistan after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, American airstrikes would be more effective if small teams of Special Operations Forces were deployed to identify ISIS targets and call in attacks. Deploying such teams is believed to be one option the Pentagon is considering. But no teams have been deployed yet.
The United States has used the strikes in part to protect Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan’s regional government where the United States has a consulate.
And it has used air power to help Kurdish pesh merga fighters and soldiers from the Iraqi government’s counterterrorism service retake the Mosul Dam.
A look at Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, a militant group that now rivals Al Qaeda in power and popularity. Video Credit By Mona El-Naggar and Sofia Perpetua on Publish Date August 11, 2014. Image Credit-/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
American airstrikes have also been used to try to protect the thousands of desperate Yazidi civilians who were airlifted from the sanctuary they sought on Mount Sinjar.
American officials said ISIS might have been planning to send several thousand reinforcements to the Mosul Dam, but it did not happen. It appears that ISIS had hoped to send technicians to the dam to keep it running and keep generating electricity for Mosul, but they could not find the experts necessary to do that before they lost control of the dam.
As the news releases from the United States Central Command have made clear, ISIS has been also using captured American equipment, including Humvees and at least one MRAP vehicle, or mine resistant, ambush-protected vehicle.
To the consternation of the military, American intelligence officials has reported that it seized 20 T-55 Russian tanks in Syria, armor that ISIS could employ in Iraq.
According to an American intelligence estimate, ISIS could not be easily defeated by killing its top leadership. Given its decentralized command and control, experienced militants could easily replenish its upper ranks, American officials said.
American officials caution that intelligence experts are still in the process of assessing ISIS’s current strength and that pinning down the precise number of its fighters is difficult in part because it is not easy to identify who is a core member of the group and who might be sympathizers fighting alongside them.
A senior American official said the Pentagon now estimated the number of fighters affiliated with ISIS to be about 17,000. That figure includes an initial vanguard of about 3,000 who swept into Mosul from Syria in early June, ISIS reinforcements from Syria since that time, as well as thousands of new foreign fighter recruits and thousands of Iraqi Sunnis, like Baathists, tribesmen and common criminals, who at least for now are allied with ISIS. The combined number of ISIS and ISIS-affiliated fighters has grown by several thousand fighters, perhaps nearly doubling, since June.
Since the United States began operations on Aug. 8, 57 of the 90 airstrikes by bombers, fighters and drones have been to support Iraqi and Kurdish forces near the Mosul Dam.
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