Situation Report: U.S. combat forces back into Iraq; State Dept. confident on Syria; Gitmo plan stalled; Iraqis think Washington supports ISIS; and lots more

By Paul McLeary with Adam Rawnsley

The sunny side of the street. A top State Department official says he’s more optimistic than ever that a political transition in Syria is within reach, even if rebels and the regime of President Bashar al-Assad have so far refused to begin negotiations. Speaking at Foreign Policy’s annual Transformational Trends forum in Washington, Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken said Russia’s military intervention to support the Assad regime has actually helped push the process along, reports FP’s John Hudson.

Following recent positive comments from Secretary of State John Kerry, who claimed, “we’re weeks away conceivably from the possibility of a big transition for Syria,” Blinken argued that Moscow’s support to Assad, in the form of airstrikes, arms transfers, and financial assistance, has “increased Russia’s leverage” over Damascus. “He owes them,” Blinken said.

Back in. American Special Operations Forces are heading back to Iraq (and pushing into Syria) with a mandate from President Barack Obama to engage in combat. The move is a sharp reversal from months of promises by administration officials that there will be no U.S. “boots on the ground” in the fight against the Islamic State.

The “specialized expeditionary targeting force” (read: combat troops) will “be able to conduct raids, free hostages, gather intelligence, and capture ISIL leaders,” Defense Secretary Ash Carter told the House Armed Services Committee on Tuesday, using an alternate name for the Islamic State. FP’s Paul McLeary writes that while “there was little talk of how the new tactic of sending more Special Operations forces to the region might change the dynamics of the battlefield in the near term,” the move promises to increase the pressure on Islamic State leadership in the form of more night raids by U.S. commandos.

Sen. John McCain (R-Az.) supports the move, mostly. He has long been an advocate for more U.S. Special Operations troops in the fight, but in a statement Tuesday called the plan only an “incremental,” and “belated step forward.”

NIMBY. The announcement of a bigger American footprint in the country didn’t come as welcome news to everyone. “We will chase and fight any American force deployed in Iraq,” Jafaar Hussaini, a spokesman for Kata’ib Hezbollah, a Shiite militia in Iraq, said. “Any such American force will become a primary target for our group. We fought them before and we are ready to resume fighting.” Reuters reports that spokesmen for “the Iranian-backed Badr Organisation and Asaib Ahl al-Haq made similar statements” on Wednesday, even as all three groups fight alongside Iraqi government forces to oust the Islamic State from the country.

Friends. The response from Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi wasn’t much better. “There is no need for foreign ground combat troops,” he said in a statement on Tuesday. “Any such support and special operations anywhere in Iraq can only be deployed subject to the approval of the Iraqi Government and in coordination with the Iraqi forces and with full respect to Iraqi sovereignty.”

All in? Meanwhile, the U.K.’s House of Commons is holding a critical vote on Wednesday to determine if British aircraft will join in the air war in Syria against the Islamic State.

Slow roll on Gitmo closure. Early last month, Pentagon officials were pretty confident that the plan to close Guantanamo Bay they handed over to the White House was about to be released, and we all waited….and waited. Now we know what happened: The White House got sticker shock. The $660 million cost estimate to close the prison down and build a new prison in the United States was too high for the White House, the Wall Street Journal reports, leading administration officials to reject the plan and send it back to the Pentagon for a rewrite.

Here we are again for another morning of SitRep, and we’re glad to have you along for the ride. As always, if you have any thoughts, announcements, tips, or national security-related events to share, please pass them along to SitRep HQ! Best way is to send them to paul.mcleary@foreignpolicy.com or on Twitter: @paulmcleary or @arawnsley.

Syria

Buzzfeed’s Mike Giglio argues that the debate over ramping up the air war against the Islamic State in the wake of the Paris attacks is irrelevant, with a ground campaign led by local forces standing the only chance of taking significant territory back from the group. Washington has bet big on the Syrian Democratic Front, a coalition of mostly Kurdish militias and some Arab fighters, hoping that the coalition can set aside ethnic differences and succeed where previous rebel train and equip efforts failed against the Islamic State.

The Syrian military dropped barrel bombs on a hospital run by the international medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in a “double tap” attack on Saturday, the Guardian reports. “Double tap” attacks involve a second wave of bombings against a target, staggered in order to attack rescue services at the scene of the initial bombing. The attack against the MSF hospital is part of an apparent campaign targeting medical facilities in rebel-held areas, with Physicians for Human Rights saying it has counted 16 such attacks just in October carried out mostly by Russian warplanes.

Iraq

A growing number of Iraqis are convinced that the United States is supplying and supporting the Islamic State, citing a series of videos purporting to show American helicopters delivering supplies to the militants, the Washington Post’s Liz Sly reports. “The allegations of U.S. collusion with the Islamic State are aired regularly in parliament by Shiite politicians and promoted in postings on social media,” pointing to the deep distrust of American motives after over a decade of war.

The Islamic State

The Financial Times catches up with the arms dealers who are supplying the Islamic State in a fascinating profile of the weapons trade in Iraq and Syria. The arms merchants say the jihadist group has plenty of guns, but it constantly thirsting for ammunition as it quickly chews through supplies in short, intense battles. The Islamic State has since devised a sophisticated logistics system to supply its ammunition needs, licensing outside arms dealers to operate within the group’s territory and establishing local “centers,” in constant communication with military commanders, to coordinate arms needs and set prices for outside arms merchants.

A new George Washington University study says that the 56 arrests related to Islamic State in the U.S. this year is the largest number of domestic terrorism-related arrests in in a single year since 2001. The New York Times reports, however, that “the recruits defy any single profile, the study found, although they are younger than previous terrorism suspects, are drawn heavily from converts to Islam and reflect increasingly prominent roles for women in the terrorist organization.”

Afghanistan

The Daily Beast reports that the Taliban is holding another, heretofore unknown American hostage in its custody. The hostage is an American man but Beast declined to provide further details about the hostage. The man joins Canadian citizen Joshua Boyle, his wife Caitlin Coleman, an American, and a child she reportedly had in captivity as the known western captives of the Taliban.

Japan

The New Yorker takes a fascinating look at the “cute” aesthetic’s popularity within Japan’s military. Reporter Matt Alt toured Japanese Self Defense Force facilities, finding anime heroines painted on the sides of attack helicopters, missiles and ships like the modern, anime equivalent of the World War II pinup art popular on American bombers.

Russia

The U.S. is looking to beef up its defenses against cruise missiles as it grows increasingly frustrated with what intelligence agencies say is Russia’s violation of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty, which limits intermediate range ballistic and cruise missiles, according to the New York Times. Brian McKeon, principal deputy under secretary of defense for policy at the Defense Department, was vague on what precisely the administration has planned to counter the threat while testifying before Congressional on Tuesday, but officials say that more details will become apparent once budgets in the Defense Department are fleshed out.

NATO

NATO is standing up a new command in Bucharest, Romania, dubbed the Multinational Division Southeast Headquarters. The headquarters will be able to command forces in Romania and Bulgaria in the event that the alliance’s Article V collective defense provision is invoked.

Drones

More drones, more problems. As the number of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the U.S. military increases, so do the hours of footage they record. All that video has to be stored somewhere, and now National Defense magazine reports that contractors are looking to pitch the Defense Department on centralized drone video storage databases.

Think tanked

A new report from CNA takes a somewhat dim view of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s strategy for how to deal with states that are in the orbit of the former Soviet Union. Putin’s decision-making “often appears tactical rather than strategic and few if any within his inner circle seem to challenge his perspectives, goals, or approaches in defining Russia’s foreign and national security policy,” the report says. “Russia’s seizure of Crimea and support for eastern Ukraine’s separatist forces fit this pattern. While the former move was immediately successful, it has created a variety of predictable challenges and dilemmas for Russian policy.”