US special forces to be deployed in Syria

US special operations forces are to be deployed to northern Syria to work with local troops in the fight against Islamic State militants, according to senior US officials.

The deployment marks the first time US troops have worked openly on the ground in Syria.

US officials say President Barack Obama ordered the deployment of fewer than 50 commandos to help coalition forces co-ordinate with local troops.

One official said the US will also be sending additional aircraft, including F-15 fighters and A-10 air support planes to Incirlik air base in Turkey.

Although the number of commandos is small, it marks an escalation of US involvement in the fight against Islamic State, which controls a large part of northern Syria and has its self-proclaimed capital in the Syrian city of Raqqah.

One official said that a first group of forces — possibly a couple of dozen — will go relatively soon to assess the situation and determine which groups on the ground the US can best work with.

More will follow once the US determines what the needs are.

The US has carried out special operations raids in Syria, and participated in a ground operation to rescue hostages last week in northern Iraq that resulted in the first US combat death in that country since 2011.

Meanwhile, Iran signalled it backed a six-month transition period in Syria followed by elections to decide Bashar al-Assad’s fate, a proposal floated at peace talks as a concession but which the president’s foes rejected as a trick to keep him in power.

Sources who described the Iranian proposal said it amounted to Assad’s closest ally dropping its insistence on him remaining in office.

But Assad’s enemies say a new election would keep him in power unless other steps were taken to remove him. His government held an election as recently as last year, which he easily won. His opponents have always rejected any proposal for a transition unless he is removed.

Iranian officials attended international peace talks on Syria for the first time in Vienna, a month after the balance of power in the four-year-old civil war shifted in Assad’s favour with Russia launching air strikes against his foes.

Iran appears to be adjusting its stance in ways that could create more ground for compromise with Western countries that are coming to accept Assad cannot be driven from power by force.

“Iran does not insist on keeping Assad in power forever,” Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Amir Abdollahian, a member of Tehran’s delegation at the Syria talks yesterday, was quoted by Iranian media as saying.

A senior official from the Middle East familiar with the Iranian position said that could go as far as ending support for Assad after the transition period.

“Talks are all about compromises and Iran is ready to make a compromise by accepting Assad remaining for six months,” the official told Reuters.

“Of course, it will be up to the Syrian people to decide about the country’s fate.”

Syrian opposition figures, already bristling from having been excluded from yesterday’s talks about the fate of their country, dismissed the reported Iranian proposal as a ruse.

“Who is mad enough to believe that under these circumstances in Syria, anybody can hold elections?” said George Sabra, a member of the Western-backed political opposition, the exiled Syrian National Coalition. “Bashar al-Assad and his regime is the root of the terrorism in Syria.”

They say any fair vote is impossible in wartime conditions in which nearly half of the country is displaced.

A senior US official and other delegates said a new round of Syria peace talks would be held in two weeks time.

All previous efforts to find a diplomatic solution to Syria’s civil war have collapsed over the insistence of the United States, European powers, Arab states and Turkey that Assad agree to leave power.

Meanwhile, Greece’s prime minister has lashed out at European “ineptness” in handling the continent’s massive immigration crisis after 31 more people – many of them children – drowned in shipwrecks in the Mediterranean Sea.

Greece’s Merchant Marine Ministry said 19 people died and 138 were rescued near the eastern island of Kalymnos, in one of the worst accidents in Greek waters since hundreds of thousands starting fleeing the war in Syria. Eight of the victims were children and three were babies.

At least three more people – a woman, a child and a baby – died when another migrant boat sank off the nearby Greek island of Rhodes, and three more are missing. On the islet of Agathonissi, a fisherman recovered the body of a boy missing from another accident on Wednesday.

The death toll in the Aegean over the past three days has now reached at least 50. On the Turkish side, four children drowned and two others are missing after two accidents involving boats en route to the Greek islands of Lesbos and Samos.

Nearly 600 people have been rescued by the Greek coastguard in the past 24 hours, while thousands more made it safely from Turkey to Greece’s south-eastern islands.

Meanwhile Spanish rescuers found the bodies of four migrants and are searching for 35 missing from a boat that ran into trouble trying to reach Spain from Morocco.