© Provided by New York Daily News l ERIN DURKIN
‘There will be circumstances’ in which troops on the ground will be needed to guide U.S. airstrikes, Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Sunday. He also said the U.S. recently had to call in Apache helicopters against the jihadists — which put pilots at greater risk than fighter jets conducting airstrikes.
U.S. military advisers will likely be needed on the ground to spot targets when Iraqi forces go on the offensive against ISIS fighters, the top U.S military officer said Sunday.
Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said “there will be circumstances” in which troops on the ground will be needed to guide U.S. airstrikes. “But I haven’t encountered one right now,” he said on ABC’s “This Week.”
Dempsey said tactics may shift when Iraqi forces try to retake Mosul, the country’s second-largest city, which fell to the Islamic State fighters.
“Mosul will likely be the decisive battle in the ground campaign,” he said. “My instinct at this point is that that will require a different kind of advising and assisting, because of the complexity of that fight.”
Dempsey also revealed that the U.S. recently had to call in Apache helicopters to prevent the jihadists from overrunning Iraqi forces in a fight that would have left ISIS with a clear path to attack the Baghdad airport.
“This is a case where you’re not going to wait until they’re climbing over the wall. They were within, you know, 20 or 25 kilometers” of the airport, he said. “And had they overrun the Iraqi unit, it was a straight shot to the airport. So, we’re not going to allow that to happen. We need that airport.”
The attack helicopters fly lower — and expose their pilots to a greater risks — than the fighter jets that have been conducting airstrikes.
On the ground Sunday, Kurdish fighters were able to halt ISIS’ advance in the Syrian town of Kobani after the U.S.-led military coalition carried out a barrage of airstrikes there, activists said.
The Kurdish enclave near the border with Turkey has seen heavy fighting since last month. The coalition conducted at least two airstrikes there Sunday.
U.S. national security adviser Susan Rice said Turkey, which has been under pressure over the situation in Kobani, has agreed to let the U.S. train Syrian rebels on its soil to fight ISIS.
Turkey will also allow American and coalition forces to use its military bases to launch attacks against ISIS, in a significant expansion of Turkish cooperation with the campaign against the militants, Rice said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Rice stressed that American troops would not be sent into combat and said the U.S. strategy against ISIS is working but will take time.
But Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who supports the use of ground troops to fight ISIS, delivered a grimmer assessment, declaring on CNN’s “State of the Union” that ISIS is “winning.”
They’re winning, and we’re not,” he said.
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