Senior US Commander Secretly Visits Syria
MEP: The top US commander for the Middle East has visited Syria secretly on Saturday to discuss Raqqa battering, officials said.
Gen. Joseph Votel’s trip was aimed at entering a war zone to check on his troops and make his own assessment of progress in organizing local Arab and Kurd fighters for what has been a slow campaign to push the Islamic State (IS or Daesh) terrorists out of Syria.
Votel is the highest-ranking U.S. military official to travel into Syria during its war. CNN has been asked to not disclose the exact location of the multiple places he visited. CNN also agreed to not disclose the intense security precautions, including how Votel flew into Syria.
In the aftermath of the visit, Brett McGurk, the US special envoy to the coalition against Islamic State (IS, ISIS/ISIL), tweeted that one of the purposes of the clandestine trip was to prepare an offensive on Raqqa, IS terrorists’ stronghold in Syria since 2013.
Votel said he brought reporters with him because, “We don’t have anything to hide. I don’t want people guessing about what we’re doing here. The American people should have the right to see what we’re doing here.”
Votel flew into northern Syria from Iraq, where he had conferred on Friday with U.S. and Iraqi military commanders. In Syria he met with U.S. military advisers working with Syrian Arab fighters and consulted with leaders of the Syrian Democratic Forces, an umbrella group of Kurdish and Arab fighters supported by the U.S.
Syria has been grabbed by civil war since 2011, with numerous opposition factions and Islamic extremist groups fighting the Syrian Arab Army in an attempt to topple the government of President Bashar Assad.
