Barack Obama takes baby steps into Syrian conflict once declared off limits as Islamic State refuses to go down

Even as US President Barack Obama sent troops back to Iraq and ordered the military to stay in Afghanistan, he insisted Syria would remain off limits for American ground forces. Now, the president has crossed his own red line.

Obama’s deployment of up to 50 US special operations troops to northern Syria to help in the fight against Islamic State is the kind of incremental move that has defined his approach to the Middle East in his second term.

While the US military footprint in the region grows, each step is taken on a small scale so as to reassure the public he is not plunging the country into another large, open-ended conflict.

The strategy may ease Americans back into the realities of war, but regional experts as well as some of Obama’s political allies say his slow ramp-up may be insufficient in defeating the fast-moving militants.

“Deploying a handful of US special operations forces to Syria will not change this situation significantly,” Frederic Hof, Obama’s former Syria special adviser, said of Friday’s announcement. “It is a Band-Aid of sorts.”

Senator Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Obama’s home state of Hawaii, said the latest escalation “is unlikely to succeed in achieving our objective of defeating IS and instead threatens to embroil the United States in Syria’s civil war”.

The military campaign against Islamic State is nowhere near the size and scope of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama has repeatedly used the costly and unpopular Iraq war in particular as an example of what he has tried to avoid in the region.