Yesterday evening UK Prime Minister David Cameron made a surprise visit to the Royal Air Force (RAF) base at Akrotiri in Cyprus which is the standard route for Britons travelling to and from Afghanistan. Whilst in Cyprus Cameron announced that 2 further RAF GR4 Tornado's will be joining the operation against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) bringing the total up to 8.
Alongside France's decision earlier in the week to increase the number of Rafele's deployed from 6 to 9 this brings the total number of strike aircraft in the European (UK, France, Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark) plus Australia part of the coalition up to 44. This is just 1 aircraft short of the number used during Operation Northern Watch making very real the possibility that these nations could act as a coalition within a coalition flying Northern Watch style armed patrols across the front-lines of Iraq to prevent ISIL from making any further advances. Today it has been announced that the Canadian Parliament is to vote on joining the coalition potentially increasing the number of aircraft event further. The obvious choice would be for this coalition within a coalition to operate from the United States Air Force (USAF) base at Incirlik in Turkey although there seems to be no indication that Turkey is going give permission for this to happen or that the US is going to put pressure on Turkey to make this happen.
It has also emerged that on Wednesday (1/10/13) through to Thursday (2/10/14) the US alongside Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) carried out an undisclosed number of air-strikes against undisclosed targets in undisclosed locations in Syria. However I suspect that at least some of these strikes occurred in the north-eastern Sinjar region close to the border with Iraq. Within Iraq the US carried out a single strike in the Sinjar region that destroyed 2 ISIL armed "Technical" trucks. They were joined by the UK who carried out a single strike close to the Rabia border town that destroyed an ISIL technical and a supply truck. The US also carried out a further strike close to Fallujah which is around 50km (30 miles) west of the capital Baghdad that targeted ISIL infantry units.
Sadly there has been no indication of any air-strikes close to the city of Kobane/Ayn al-Arab. Sitting just 1km (0.6 miles) from the border between Syria and Turkey Kobane is of vital strategic importance because if it falls not only will it hand a huge propaganda victory to ISIL but it will also give them a clear route to smuggle oil out of and weapons and fighters in from Turkey. Due to the failure to conduct air-strikes in support of the Syrian Kurdish forces who have been defending Kobane it now seems that the city is being over-run with ISIL entering the south-eastern sector of the city this morning. This seems likely to provide Turkey with a pretext to invade Syrian Kurdistan to push back ISIL and provide a buffer-zone.
The fall of Kobane however is not the most serious problem being faced by the US-led coalition. As people have been warning for many weeks US President Barack Obama's decision to only carry out pin-prick strikes against ISIL has had the effect of inoculating them against air-strikes meaning that they have moved away for Blitzkrieg type attacks. Although this has inhibited their ability to fight and seize territory on a large scale it means that it is now going to be much more difficult to achieve Obama's stated aim of "Degrading and ultimately destroying ISIL." That will now require much closer co-ordination with forces on the ground and likely an increase in the number of special forces boots on the ground who are already operating extensively in Iraq even if Obama is not prepared to admit it. The decision to expand operations into Syria before they were properly up and running in Iraq has only made the problem much worse.
There remains though a high potential for a very successful Northern Watch style operation which should start without further delay.
16:25 on 3/10/14 (UK date).
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