US soldiers ‘in Kobane to help Kurds’
BEIRUT: US soldiers are in Kobane, the town in northern Syria nearly destroyed in fierce fighting with the Islamic State (IS) group, to train Kurdish forces to battle the jihadists, Kurdish sources said on Thursday.
Mustapha Abdi, an activist in the town on the Turkish border, said the American instructors had arrived “in recent hours”, in what is the first official deployment of US ground troops in Syria.
A source with the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) said the Americans would help plan offensives against two Syrian cities held by the IS — Jarablus and the jihadists’ Syrian “capital”, Raqqa.
At the same time, they would help coordinate with the Kurds and their Arab and Syriac Christian allies on the ground air strikes on the IS by the US-led coalition, the YPG source said.
Mr Abdi said that the troops who had arrived were a “first group of instructors” who would train the Kurds.
Rami Abdel Rahman, the director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based monitor, said “more than 50 American instructors have arrived in northern and northeastern Syria”.
He said they had arrived in two groups over the past two days, coming from Turkey and from the autonomous Kurdish region of neighbouring Iraq. He said about 30 were in Kobane itself, with the rest in Hasakeh province in eastern Syria.
Mr Abdel Rahman, whose group relies on a local network of sources, said the US troops are expected to rendezvous in Kobane to train fighters from the Syrian Democratic Forces, an alliance of factions backed by the United States.
The US Central Command declined to comment on details.
“We have said before that we will be putting a small number of troops on the ground in Syria to coordinate with our partners there in a non-combat role. We will not be providing the specifics of their whereabouts or travel plans beyond that,” a statement said.
The news comes after Brett McGurk, US President Barack Obama’s special envoy to the coalition, said on Sunday that US forces would be arriving “very soon”.