NEW YORK/Kabul - The United States is boosting its aerial campaign against Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria, shifting more attack and surveillance aircraft from Afghanistan to a base in Kuwait, according to a media report.
Military officials say that a dozen A-10 ground-attack planes have been moved from Afghanistan to Kuwait to support Iraqi ground troops battling the IS militants, the New York Times reported Thursday.
Half a dozen missile-firing Reaper drones are also expected to be redeployed from Afghanistan to be used in the war, deepening American involvement in the conflict and presenting new challenges for the military planners who work from the Shaw Air Force based in central South Carolina - far from the targets they will pick for those aircraft, the newspaper said.
The deployment comes during a political fight on Capitol Hill and in the Pentagon about whether the A-10, nicknamed the Warthog, should be retired. Senior defense officials have said they want to get rid of the service’s remaining 283 A-10s to save $3.7 billion over five years, but critics, including Senaror John McCain, a Republican, said that will rob the military of an aircraft that is uniquely suited to target insurgents in ground wars.
However, as the US steps up the air campaign, military planners are finding it increasingly more difficult to pick up targets for the American air power, the Times said. ‘When we target a nation-state, we’ve typically been looking at their capability for decades, and have extensive target sets,’ said Major Sonny Alberdeston, the targeting chief at an Air Force base in South Carolina, where military planners analyze and select targets that US and coalition warplanes strike in Iraq and Syria.
‘But these guys are moving around. They can be in one place, and then a week later, they’re gone,’ Alberdeston told the Times. The allied warplanes have carried out nearly1, 080 airstrikes in Iraq and Syria since the bombing campaign began on August 8, according to US Central Command. General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said earlier this month that US forces have started training Iraqi troops in the western part of the country. President Barack Obama has authorized dispatching up to 1,500 forces to Iraq, nearly doubling the planned US troop presence there.
Moreover, Afghanistan’s upper house of parliament on Thursday approved two agreements with the US and NATO allowing about 12,500 troops to remain in the country next year as concerns grow over the worsening insurgency.
The Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA) with the United States, and a similar pact with NATO, were approved by the lower house of parliament on Sunday before being sent to the senate.
Both documents were the source of huge friction between the Afghan government and its allies under previous president Hamid Karzai.
But President Ashraf Ghani, who came to power in September, reset ties by signing the long-awaited deals on his first day in power.
‘We approved both documents today,’ Belgis Roshan, a senator, told AFP.
Qadamuddin Nekpa, a parliamentary media officer, said only seven MPs voted against the deals.
US-led NATO combat operations will finish at the end of this year, but the Taliban have launched a series of recent offensives and suicide attacks that have severely tested Afghan soldiers and police. On Thursday, a suicide bomber rammed his explosives-packed car into a British embassy vehicle in Kabul, killing one British citizen and at least five Afghans.
Five children were among more than 30 bystanders injured in the blast, officials said.