heard it from richard and andrea and the ambassador, u.s. military officials say the current strategy just hasn t been working. there is little progress here and. there but any idea that we re going to destroy and defeat isis which, of course, is the president s primary objective here is totally out of the question with the current strategy. you can t do that with air strikes alone. you need boots on the ground for at least targeting. now ate peait appears they ll b fighting alongside the forces in syria. in terms of a point you run up and we talked about in the past, too on this network is concern over the different groups. initially it s the kurds you feel like you may have a better sense, there s a better sense of sort who have the ally is at that point. but the reality is with all the different groups and the way they flip-flop as you pointed out, mick, one day you could think you re working with somebody toward a common goal and then the next day you may foinld out this group is
incredibly tricky. no matter how well trained you are, there is also the issue which we ve been talking about this morning, some of these alliances shifting. and often without warning. what i just described, that s a description of the shifting alliances. it s an agreement between the kurds and the assad government that can change any time and at one point when we were on the ground in a particular area we were, it might change. and then here s another issue. the kurds really do have pretty good control of the area they have. but just further on is isis defact d defacto capital. we asked if there will be a push on that city. the trouble they have is that place is majority sunni arab. if we move in there, even if we take that city, will the local community welcome us? probably not. will they turn against us? quite likely. so that again is the issue. if the plan is to hept kurds push their front line, they re
government s forces are in an alliance against isis in that particular place, for example, when we were there. it s difficult because each house that you take, isis leave mines, booby traps so they have to be very careful moving forward. some parts of that area are still controlled by the syrian government. and, of course, u.s. forces coming into contact with syrian government forces present some really tricky issues. when we were there, the syrian government was using artillery to attack isis. there is one stage where there was a really tense moment between the kurds and the syrian government forces because the syrian government forces thought the kurds had been bombing them. and for a moment we thought that the syrian was turn their artillery on us. so that s the difficulty of operating in this area. okay, it s a small u.s. force. but it s really tricky. a small force.
the white house set to announce a small number of u.s. forces will be sent to syria to fight isis our reporter recently traveled to the region. lucky you re in new york today so we can talk this through in person. we were talking about the challenges that the special operations forces will face. yeah. as they go in. lay that out for us. i was there a few months ago in this kurdish-controlled area of syria. you cross from northern iraq. it s about a three or four hour road journey and all of that journey on the left hand side is the isis front line with the kurdish forces. they re called the ypg. then when you get to an area like hasica, there is close combat in an urban setting between the ypg and isis and, by the way, between the at forces from the assad government. so the kurds and assad
the relationships in syria as we know are so complicated. not just in terms of the syrian government and kurds and isis but also in terms of turkey. lay some of that out for us, richard, and the challenges that could be faced in that respect. well, turkey is going to be directly involved in this intensified campaign because the white house is going to announce very soon is a three pronged approach. one sending special operations forces on the ground in syria working with militia groups to fight isis directly. the second part of the intensified strategy is basing a rapid reaction force. unclear how large it will be. it will be bigger than the dozens of troops that are going into syria in northern iraq. and the third component is sending more combat aircraft to