AFP

Baghdad

US President Barack Obama said yesterday that deploying additional troops to Iraq signals a “new phase” in the fight against the Islamic State (IS) group, as Baghdad investigated whether strikes killed the militant group’s leader.

After earlier unveiling plans to send up to 1,500 more US troops to Iraq to advise and train the country’s forces, Obama told CBS News yesterday that the US-led effort to defeat IS was moving to a new stage.

“Phase one was getting an Iraqi government that was inclusive and credible - and we now have done that,” Obama told CBS News.

“Rather than just try to halt (IS’s) momentum, we’re now in a position to start going on some offence,” the president added, stressing the need for Iraqi ground troops to start pushing back IS fighters.

“We will provide them close air support once they are prepared to start going on the offence against (IS),” Obama said.

“But what we will not be doing is having our troops do the fighting.”

Going on the offensive will be a significant challenge for Iraq’s forces, which saw multiple divisions fall apart in the early days of the militant offensive.

The additional troops announced by Obama would roughly double the number of American military personnel in the country to about 3,100, marking a significant return of US forces to Iraq by a president who has hailed his role in their 2011 departure.

A US-led coalition has already been carrying out air strikes against IS in Syria and Iraq, where the extremist group has declared a “caliphate” in large areas of the two countries under its control.

Some of those strikes targeted a gathering of IS leaders near the northern Iraqi city of Mosul late on Friday, the Pentagon said, and Iraqi authorities were seeking to determine if the group’s chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had been killed.