US Special Forces deployed as ‘human shields’ to salvage terror assets in Syria
Last week, America’s top military official, General Joseph F Dunford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Senate committee that Russia’s air support had changed everything. “
The balance of forces right now are in Assad's advantage,” he said.
This is the context in which to interpret the latest, surprise move by Obama to send Special Forces into Syria. It is more about inhibiting Russian success in destroying the sundry anti-regime forces on the ground than about either “helping the fight against Islamic State” as claimed, or about misgivings of a large-scale American invasion.
The troop contingent that Obama has ordered amounts to 50 Special Forces personnel. That is hardly going to be a decisive blow to Islamic State militants, even if we believe the official rationale for their deployment.
The White House, in its announcement, was at pains to emphasize that the troops would not be in a combat role and would only be acting to “advise and train” Kurdish fighters and others belonging to the little-known Syrian Arab Coalition.
But here is perhaps the significant part of the story. “The move could potentially put the American troops in the cross hairs of Russia,” reports the New York Times. Significantly, too, the Pentagon will not be informing the Russian military of the exact whereabouts of its ground personnel.
That suggests that
the real purpose for Obama sending in the troops is to restrict Russian offensive operations by introducing the risk of bombing American forces. In effect, the US Special Forces are being used as human shields to protect American regime-change assets on the ground.
These assets include an array of jihadist mercenary brigades, which
the US and its allies have invested billions of dollars in for the objective of regime change in Syria. The misnomer of “moderate rebels” belies abundant evidence that the mercenaries include Al Qaeda-linked terror groups, including Islamic State. CIA supplies of anti-tank TOW missiles as well as Toyota jeeps are just a glimpse of the foreign covert-sponsorship.
https://www.rt.com/op-edge/320356-syria-us-troops-shields/
