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Arab Nations Offer to Conduct Airstrikes Against ISIS, U.S. Officials Say
Arab Nations Offer to Fight ISIS From Air
(about 7 hours later)
PARIS — Several Arab countries have offered to carry out airstrikes against militants from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, senior State Department officials said Sunday.
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration said Sunday that “several” Arab nations had offered to join in airstrikes against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, but any sustained military campaign does not appear imminent, and likely will require an even more significant commitment from other nations and fighting forces in the region.
The offer was disclosed by American officials traveling with Secretary of State John Kerry, who is approaching the end of a weeklong trip that was intended to mobilize international support for the campaign against ISIS.
In interviews and public statements, administration and military officials described a battle plan that would not accelerate in earnest until disparate groups of Iraqi forces, Kurds and Syrian rebels stepped up to provide the fighting forces on the ground. Equipping, training and coordinating that effort is a lengthy process, officials cautioned.
“There have been offers both to Centcom and to the Iraqis of Arab countries taking more aggressive kinetic action,” said one of the officials, who used the acronym for the United States Central Command, which oversees military operations in the Middle East.
American officials have made it clear they do not want the airstrikes to get ahead of the ground action against ISIS, which they said would take time to mass. “This isn’t going to be ‘shock and awe’ with hundreds of airstrikes,” one official said, referring to the initial attack on Baghdad at the opening of the Iraq war in March, 2003. “We don’t want this to look like an American war.”
Mr. Kerry, who is in Paris to attend an international conference the French are hosting on Monday on providing aid to the new Iraqi government, has already visited Baghdad; Amman, Jordan; Jidda, Saudi Arabia; Ankara, Turkey; and Cairo.
Iraqi and Kurdish officials are pressing their view of what the next step should be, even as the United States has carried out more than 150 airstrikes since President Obama announced the campaign to destroy ISIS on Sept. 10.
During Mr. Kerry’s stop in Jidda on Thursday, 10 Arab countries joined the United States in issuing a communiqué that endorsed efforts to confront and ultimately “destroy” ISIS, including military action to which nations would contribute “as appropriate.”
Specifically, senior Iraqi and Kurdish officials asked the United States as recently as this weekend to take action along the Iraqi-Syrian border to deprive ISIS of the safe havens it enjoys in that area.
American officials said that the communiqué should be interpreted as meaning that some, but not all, of the 10 Arab countries would play a role in the military effort.
“The Iraqis have asked for assistance in the border regions, and that’s something we’re looking at,” one State Department official said.
The United States has a broad definition of what it would mean to contribute to the military campaign.
The description of a calibrated military buildup by coalition forces, combined with a steady effort led by the U.S. Treasury Department to choke off ISIS’s ability to reap $1 million or more a day from oil sales, emerged as the administration has tried to define what Mr. Obama meant when he said the American goal was to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the Sunni extremist group.
“Providing arms could be contributing to the military campaign,” said a second State Department official. “Any sort of training activity would be contributing to the military campaign.”
The president’s chief of staff, Denis McDonough, provided the most current definition of White House thinking on Sunday during an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Using an alternative acronym for the extremist group, he said that “success looks like an ISIL that no longer threatens our friends in the region, no longer threatens the United States, an ISIL that can’t accumulate followers or threaten Muslims in Syria, Iraq or otherwise.”
Still, while the United States would clearly have the dominant role in an air campaign to roll back ISIS’s gains in Iraq, it is clear that other nations may also participate.
That definition falls short of the classic understanding of what it means to destroy an opposing force. But the administration is betting that it has tailored the goals to appeal to the coalition of oftentimes reluctant partners it is trying to assemble, many of whom are deeply suspicious of each other.
President François Hollande of France told Iraqi officials that his country would be willing to carry out airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq, senior Iraqi officials said.
Secretary of State John Kerry, speaking from Paris, declined to say which states had offered to contribute air power, an announcement White House officials said could await his return to testify in Congress early this week. State Department officials, who asked not to be identified under the agency’s protocol for briefing reporters, said there were other ways Arab nations could participate in an air campaign against ISIS without dropping bombs, such as flying arms to Iraqi or Kurdish forces, conducting reconnaissance flights or providing logistical support and refueling.
“We need aerial support from our allies,” Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi of Iraq said during a joint news conference with Mr. Hollande on Friday. “The French president promised me today that France will participate in this effort, hitting the positions of the terrorists in Iraq.”
“I don’t want to leave you with the impression that these Arab members haven’t offered to do airstrikes because several of them have,” said one State Department official. “The Iraqis would have to be a major participant in that decision,” the official added. “It has to be well structured and organized.”
Prime Minister Tony Abbott of Australia has also said that his country will join the air campaign and is sending as many as eight FA-18 attack planes, as well as an early warning aircraft and a refueling plane.
The United Arab Emirates, which provided some air power in the 2011 attacks on Libya, seemed at the top of the list, with Qatar hosting an American military headquarters. American officials cautioned that all strikes would have to be approved by the newly assembled government in Iraq, as well as by American military planners. That could prove just one challenge to the offer by Arab nations to participate in airstrikes: While Iraq’s struggling military forces have experience operating with the United States, its Shiite-dominated government has never worked with the Sunni states of the Gulf.
The Australian aircraft will operate from the United Arab Emirates. Australia is also sending 200 troops, including commandos, to serve as advisers to Iraqi soldiers and the Kurdish pesh merga forces.
The United States has identified ISIS targets in Iraq over the past several weeks. But officials said they were waiting, in part, to match the allied commitments with actual contributions: warplanes, support aircraft that can refuel or provide intelligence, more basing agreements to carry out strikes, and the insertion of trainers from other Western countries.
The State Department officials, who asked not to be identified under the agency’s protocol for briefing reporters, did not say which Arab nations had offered to carry out airstrikes, and there are also other ways Arab nations could participate in an air campaign against ISIS without dropping bombs, such as flying arms to Erbil in the Kurdistan region or Baghdad, conducting reconnaissance flights or providing logistical support and refueling. The officials said the Arab offers were under discussion.
Tellingly, there are no plans, as of now, to increase the number of American attack planes in the region. The aircraft carrier Carl Vinson is scheduled to relieve the carrier George H. W. Bush in the Persian Gulf sometime next month; if the Pentagon changed its plans and kept two carriers in the Gulf, it could double carrier-based firepower over Iraq and Syria. But for now, there is no plan to do so, officials said. Nor are there any plans to increase American ground-based strike aircraft at facilities around the region, in hopes that Persian Gulf and European allies would make up the difference.
“I don’t want to leave you with the impression that these Arab members haven’t offered to do airstrikes because several of them have,” said the first State Department official. “The Iraqis would have to be a major participant in that decision,” the official added. “It has to be well structured and organized.”
Another striking feature of the American plan, officials said, was the deliberate exclusion of coordination with two other players with an interest — and some ability — to take on ISIS: The government of Iran, and the forces of President Bashar al-Assad, who Mr. Obama declared three years ago was a brutal dictator who had to leave office.
Iraqi officials have already offered some thoughts about what the next step should be. In recent weeks, the United States has focused its airstrikes on the defense of Erbil, securing the Mosul Dam and protecting the Haditha Dam.
Mr. Kerry has ruled out cooperative efforts with Iranians, who a senior administration official said last week are “looking for whatever leverage they can get” in the conflict in hopes of using it to lift pressure on their nuclear program. Iranian backed militias were on the ground in the Iraqi town, Amerli, recently, and provided the muscle that Iraqi forces could not in ending a siege by ISIL.
But Mr. Abadi has asked the United States to take action on the Syrian side of the Iraqi-Syrian border to deprive ISIS of the safe havens it enjoys in that area. Massoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdish autonomous region, made a similar request in telephone call with Mr. Kerry on Saturday night, State Department officials said.
While the administration insisted it would not be working alongside Mr. Assad’s forces, they were clearly working toward the same goal — leading to fears that the United States could essentially become Mr. Assad’s air force, at least temporarily, if it begins attacking ISIS emplacements inside Syria.
“The Iraqis have asked for assistance in the border regions, and that’s something we’re looking at,” the first State Department official said.
As described by American officials, the battle strategy calls for assembling a force in Iraq first, where the Iraqi army would be guided by 12-man teams of American “advisers” that are expected to begin operating within days, and new arms and other assistance for the Kurdish forces. Only later would the effort expand to Syria, and the administration is pressing for a congressional vote this week on a $500 million arms package for “moderate” members of the Syrian opposition, now aimed at ISIS rather than the Assad government.
Iraqi officials have long experience working with the United States military and appealed for American airstrikes against ISIS fighters in Iraq months before the Obama administration decided to conduct them.
Officials acknowledged that the so-called moderate rebel forces were fractured, and far weaker than ISIS. Even so, administration officials struggled to explain whether the United States was at war with ISIS, as both the White House and Pentagon spokesman said it was last week, or whether it was engaged in a more traditional counterterrorism action. That was how Mr. Kerry characterized the strategy in an effort to make it easier for Sunni states to explain to their own populations why they would be contributing forces against Sunni extremists.
But the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government has no experience in working with militaries from Sunni states in the Persian Gulf.
“Originally this is not a war,” Mr. Kerry said on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” trying to separate it from the action in 2003 that he had opposed as a senator. “This is not combat troops on the ground. It’s not hundreds of thousands of people.” He went on to compare it to “war with Al Qaeda and its affiliates,” and said that “in the same context” the United States was “at war with ISIL.”
Arab nations have the capability to conduct air operations. Saudi Arabian planes participated in the American-led coalition that evicted Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991.
And the United Arab Emirates sent F-16s and Mirage fighters to join the 2011 international military intervention in Libya that eventually led to the ouster of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.
Last month, the U.A.E. carried out airstrikes against Islamist allied militias in Libya, operating out of bases in Egypt. The Obama administration was not consulted in advance of that operation, American officials have acknowledged.
While indicating a willingness to carry out airstrikes inside Iraq, France appears to have reservations about bombing targets inside Syria. But some Arab states appear to have no such inhibitions.
“Some have indicated for quite a while to do them elsewhere,” the first State Department official said. “But, again, we’ve got to sort through all that, because you can’t just go and bomb something.”
Iraq has a small air force and a limited capacity to deliver accurate airstrikes. The civilian casualties from some Iraqi attacks have been exploited by ISIS to try to mobilize popular support against the Iraqi government.
On Saturday, Mr. Abadi sought to reassure Sunnis that Iraqi forces would not risk civilian casualties by using artillery or conducting airstrikes against ISIS targets in heavily populated areas.
“They have a very new air force,” a third State Department official said, referring to the Iraqi military. “Their targeting is not nearly as precise as ours and they have made some real mistakes.”
Much of the air campaign is intended to support Iraqi armed forces that are still in the process of being reconstituted and new Iraqi National Guard units, which will include Sunni tribal fighters but which still need to be established. A Pentagon program to train and equip the moderate Syrian resistance also has yet to be carried out.
The time-consuming mission to train these ground forces is essential because they are needed to control territory after ISIS fighters are pushed out, and the Obama administration has ruled out sending American ground troops. But it will slow the pace of the campaign to contain, degrade and eventually destroy the group, a process that officials said last week could take three years.
“This is not the ’91 gulf war,” the first State Department official said on Sunday. “It’s just a different type of campaign.”
Regarding other military support, Saudi Arabia has agreed to provide bases for training moderate Syrian rebels. American officials say there have been similar efforts by other Arab countries, but declined to identify them.
Iraq’s foreign minister announced on Sunday that the new Iraqi government had received a political lift when Saud al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, promised that his country would open an embassy in Baghdad. But no date for opening an embassy was given and the announcement noted that “security issues” would first need to be resolved.
But in a setback for the effort to portray the campaign as a partnership with Muslim-majority states rather than a Western intervention, an influential Muslim scholar on Sunday declared his opposition to the American action even though he said he was also against ISIS.
“I disagree completely with ISIS in thought and means, but I do not accept that America fights them,” said the scholar, Sheikh Yusef Qaradawi, leader of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, in a Twitter message reported around the region. The United States, he said, “is not moved by Islamic values but by its own interests, even if it spills blood.”
Sheikh Qaradawi, an Egyptian-born cleric based in Doha, Qatar, who is a popular television preacher and close to the Muslim Brotherhood, has been a vocal opponent of ISIS for months. In July, his scholars’ union declared ISIS’s self-proclaimed caliphate “null and void,” arguing that its extremism stigmatized more mainstream Islamists and undermined broader Sunni opposition movements in Syria and Iraq. Now his criticism of the American role may increase the fears of a backlash against Arab governments that publicly join the campaign.
