A week after President Barack Obama authorized airstrikes targeting Islamic militants in northern Iraq, the United States announced it was dispatching over 100 addition military advisers to the area in a sign of escalating operations.
Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel said Monday that Obama authorized 130 new military “assessors,” who arrived in the Kurdish capital of Erbil Monday. The New York Times reports that those additional forces bring the number of military personnel in the country to 1,000.
Hagel’s announcement comes as thousands of people including many members of the Yazidi religious minority have fled Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) militants and are trapped on Mount Sinjar, where they face what United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon described as an “especially harrowing” crisis. Hagel said that the “assessors” would “take a closer look and give a more in-depth assessment of where we can continue to help the Iraqis with what they’re doing and the threats that they are now dealing with.”
Though Hagel said that “this is not a combat boots-on-the-ground operation. We’re not going to have that kind of operation,” Firedoglake‘s DSWright writes that these incremental expansions of forces beg an important question. He writes that “sooner or later, these little contingents are going to add up to numbers that are hard to hide. What exactly is the threshold for ‘boots on the ground’ to be reached?”
As the Associated Press reports, the new military operations have been met with “broad bipartisan support”