Hagel: Obama administration plans to widen air campaign against Islamic State

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Thursday that he is “sober about the challenges” ahead in the growing war against the Islamic State and stressed that the Obama administration is planing to widen the scope of the current campaign of airstrikes against the group in Syria and Iraq.

The Pentagon is also pushing now to grow its program for retraining Iraqi military troops, Mr. Hagel said, adding that, once those forces “build strength, the tempo and intensity of our coalition air campaign will accelerate in tandem.”

The Obama administration’s announcement last week to deploy more U.S. military troops to Iraq means there will soon be roughly 3,000 American personnel on the ground providing “support to Iraqi forces,” Mr. Hagel said in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee on Thursday morning.

Mr. Hagel suggested that a growing goal of the strategy is to kill the Islamic State’s leadership but offered few details about recent strikes on the group’s commanders.

While the Iraqi government claimed this week that Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi may have been seriously injured by an air strike in Western Iraq, Mr. Hagel and other Defense Department officials have refused to confirm the claim.

Mr. Hagel said Thursday only that “last weekend, airstrikes hit a gathering of ISIL battlefield commanders near Mosul.”

He asserted that the air strike campaign has been successful in that it has “forced” fighters from the Islamic State — also known by the acronyms ISIL and ISIS — to “alter their tactics” on the ground in Iraq.

“We knew they would, they will adapt, they will adjust,” Mr. Hagel said. “Maneuvering in smaller groups, sometimes making it more difficult to identify targets, hiding large equipment and changing their communications methods.”

He added that there are particular difficulties in fighting the group inside Syria and that he and others in the Obama administration “are sober about the challenges we face as ISIL exploits the complicated, long-running Syrian conflict.”

“We do not have a partner government to work with in Syria or regular military partners to work with, as we do in Iraq,” Mr. Hagel said. “In the near term our military aims in Syria are limited to isolating and destroying ISIL safe havens.”