Special to WorldTribune.com

United States special forces will arrive in Syria “very soon,” in the first deployment of U.S. ground troops since the coalition to fight Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL) was formed.

“This is focused on isolating the capital of ISIL in Raqqa,” U.S. special envoy Brett McGurk said on CBS’s “Face the Nation”.

The U.S. ground troops will be “going in very soon,” McGurk said. The special operations forces will be tasked with assisting an Arab-Kurd coalition in Syria that is comprised of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), Arab rebel forces and Syrian Christian fighters.

The local coalition has “been doing a very successful operation,” according to McGurk, who said it has retaken about 1,100 square kilometers (435 square miles) in the last two weeks and killed about 300 ISIL jihadists.

The U.S.-led coalition plans to “suffocate and strangle them (ISIL) in the core” in Iraq and Syria through multiple coordinated offensives, McGurk said.

McGurk said coalition forces plan to cut off ISIL’s main access routes at the Syrian border that link Raqqa and the Iraqi city of Mosul.

U.S. President Barack Obama’s decision to authorize up to 50 special forces was highly criticized as being “too little, too late.”

Meanwhile, the Syrian regime said the U.S. decision to send ground troops was an “act of aggression.”

“When America sends ground forces into Syrian territories without an agreement with the Syrian government it becomes an intervention and aggression,” said Syrian parliament member Sharif Shehadeh. “Will America allow Russian ground forces to go into America without an agreement? I think the answer is no.”

  Brett McGurk, Post-Paris response: U.S. special forces to arrive in Syria ‘very soon’, Raqqa, WorldTribune, YPG