Defense Secretry Ash Carter made the announcement during a visit to Baghdad Monday. He said the additional troops will be sent to the newly retaken Qayyarah Airbase West, about 60 kilometers south of Mosul, which will serve as a logistics and air hub for the coalition.
“The point of seizing that airfield is to be able to establish a logistics and air hub in the immediate vicinity of Mosul,” Carter told reporters before entering Iraq.
The seizure of the airbase by Iraqi forces marked the completion of the coalition’s “first 10 plays” toward defeating Islamic State, said a senior U.S. defense official. “Qayarrah was definitely the big fish on that list because of its strategic importance,” the senior official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
In his fourth trip to Iraq as defense secretary, Carter will meet with Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi and Defense Minister Khaled al-Obeidi in Baghdad, and will speak by phone with Masoud Barzani, the president of Iraqi Kurdistan.
What were the 10 plays?
Back in December and January, President Barack Obama and Carter laid out 10 strategic goals – some of them geographical, some of them functional – that needed to occur before Iraqi security forces, Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and the Syrian counter-IS forces could retake Raqqah and Mosul, Islamic State’s de-facto capital in Syria and largest stronghold in Iraq.
The recapturing of Hit, Rupta and Ramadi in Iraq were key steps toward splitting the Iraq and Syria battlefields, said one senior defense official. Establishing a staging base in Makhmour has been considered a crucial step in encircling Mosul.
On the Syrian side, Shaddadi, located on the road from Raqqah to Mosul, also was deemed critical so that Islamic State’s core was “severed in half,” Carter said, stifling movement of people and supplies between the two cities.
The envelopment of Manbij by U.S.-trained opposition forces has taken a “hub” for Islamic State foreign fighters, Col. Chris Garver, the coalition spokesman based in Baghdad, told reporters last month.
Starting the train and equip program within northeast Syria was another of the 10 plays, said a second defense official.