President Obama predicted that U.S. troops would help Iraqi forces make significant progress this year to beat back the Islamic State and retake one of the largest cities in Iraq.
“My expectation is that by the end of the year, we will have created the conditions whereby Mosul will eventually fall,” Obama told CBS News’ Charlie Rose in a wide-ranging interview that aired Monday night. “As we see the Iraqis willing to fight and gaining ground, we must make sure that we are providing them more support.”
The president made the statement the same day he announced that 217 more troops, mostly special operators, would deploy to Iraq as advisers, and that the U.S. was for the first time was sending Apache helicopters to help accomplish the mission.
“We’re not doing the fighting ourselves, but when we provide training, when we provide special forces who are backing them up, when we are gaining intelligence, working with the coalitions that we have, what we’ve seen is that we can continually tighten the noose,” he said.
The increased military deployment to Iraq increases the number of U.S. troops in the country from 3,870 to 4,087.
