A day after President Obama was criticized for saying he lacked a “complete strategy” for training Iraqi troops, the White House tried gamely to explain Tuesday what he really meant.
And the administration’s answer was: The U.S. does have a strategy in Iraq, but that strategy is not yet complete.
White House press secretary Josh Earnest said the president is discussing “to ramp up the numbers and capacity” of Iraqi troops fighting the Islamic State in Anbar Province, where the terrorist group has made recent gains.
“That’s exactly the strategy that we’re pursuing,” Mr. Earnest said. “Now, how exactly to implement that is something that we’re still working through.”
U.S. officials told The Associated Press that the administration is nearing a decision on how to improve and accelerate the training of Iraqi security forces, including the possibility of putting new training camps in Anbar Province. The officials said the additional training could require up to 1,000 more U.S. troops, but no final decisions have been made on the plan’s details.
The possible changes are aimed at bolstering the participation of Sunni tribes in the fight. The plan is not likely to include the deployment of U.S. forces closer to the front lines to either call in airstrikes or advise smaller Iraqi units in battle.
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In Iraq, Islamic State militants wearing Iraqi police uniforms carried out an attack Tuesday in Amiriyat al Falluja, a city less than 40 miles from Baghdad. The gunmen, who wore suicide vests, killed two civilians and two police officers at a town council building before they were shot dead by police.
The town is among the few in Anbar still controlled by the central government since the terrorist group captured Ramadi last month.
Mr. Obama has sent about 3,000 U.S. troops to Iraq to serve as trainers and advisers since the Islamic State stepped up its rampaging in northern and western parts of the country last year. A U.S.-led coalition also has been carrying out hundreds of airstrikes against Islamic State targets in Iraq and Syria since last August.
Mr. Earnest said training and equipping Iraqi security forces is “merely one element” of the administration’s overall strategy for defeating the Islamic State, a mission that a State Department spokesman said Tuesday could take three to five years.
Administration officials have generally praised the leadership of Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, but say he must include more Sunni fighters in the Iraqi army to confront the Islamic State in Sunni-dominated regions. The failure to do so led to the ouster of former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
“We have been blunt about our assessment that one of the things that created the kind of weakness that [the Islamic State] capitalized on last year was the failure of the Maliki-led central government in Baghdad to demonstrate to the diverse population of Iraq that he had their best interests at heart,” Mr. Earnest said. “And that did cause that country to fracture, particularly along sectarian lines, and did create an opening that [the Islamic State] has capitalized on.”
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• Dave Boyer can be reached at dboyer@washingtontimes.com.
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