Efforts to stop the spread of Islamic State terrorists throughout Iraq are hampered by the lack of Iraqis willing to serve in the nation’s security forces, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter told a House panel today.
The fall of Ramadi to the extremist group last month was “deeply disappointing” and prompted Defense Department officials to reexamine the ground campaign—a dual pronged strategy of airstrikes and the training and equipping of Iraqi forces, Carter said in a House Armed Services Committee hearing on U.S policy and strategy in the Middle East. Since then, the department has taken steps to enhance training efforts and expedite the delivery of equipment such as counter-improvised explosive device (IED) and anti-tank systems to Iraqi Security Forces.
But ultimately, “Our training efforts in Iraq have thus far been slowed by a lack of trainees—we simply haven’t received enough recruits,” he said. By this fall, the military planned to train about 24,000 Iraqi Security Forces troops at four training sites, but have only received enough recruits to train about 7,000, as well as about 2,000 Counterterrorism Service personnel.
Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), the committee’s ranking member, said the U.S. military needs to focus on training Sunni and Kurdish forces that are willing and able to fight the Islamic State, instead of relying on the Shiite-led government in Baghdad.
“At what point do we shift the strategy?” he asked. “Believe me, I understand the implications of that, the concerns about the fracturing of Iraq. But as I have said many times before, that cow has left the barn. Iraq is fractured.”
Although the Defense Department will still coordinate with the Iraqi government to train and equip Sunni and Kurdish fighters, the deployment of 450 U.S. military trainers to Taqqadum Air Base in Anbar province will give it a stronger foothold for recruiting Sunnis, Carter said. The base is located “in the heart of Sunni territory” between Ramadi and Fallujah. Defense Department officials have said trainers will help Iraqis plan a strategy to retake those two cities, which are held under ISIL control.
It would be reasonable to expect an increase of Sunni recruits within weeks, Carter said.
“We had had unused capacity in train and equip sites in parts of Iraq over the last several months,” he said. “Now that is turning around. It has to stay turned around.”
The addition of 450 trainers will bring the total number of U.S. servicemembers in Iraq to 3,550 troops. However, some lawmakers suggested that the country needed to put forward a stronger presence.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army Gen. Martin Dempsey stressed that stability in Iraq must be cultivated by Iraqi actors, not just through U.S. military force.
“Could we go in there and do a better job against ISIL ourselves? Absolutely,” he said. “But we’d be back there in two years.”
During the hearing, Carter restated that he would support President Barack Obama if he vetoed the defense budget, which uses wartime spending to pay for base budget expenses. The Defense Department needs a multi-year view of spending, said Carter, who urged lawmakers to come to a compromise that would repeal sequestration.
“This looks terrible. It gives the appearance that we are diminishing ourselves because we can’t come together behind a budget,” he said.