Obama signals 'new phase'

US President Barack Obama yesterday said that deploying additional troops to Iraq signals a "new phase" in the fight against the Islamic State group, as Baghdad investigated whether strikes killed the jihadists' 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 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 on Sunday."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," Obama said.

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 jihadist offensive, leaving major units that need to be reconstituted.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 an Islamic "caliphate" in large areas of the two countries under its control.Some of those strikes targeted a gathering of ISIS 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.A senior Iraqi intelligence official said there was no "accurate information" on whether Baghdadi was dead but that authorities were investigating.The death of the elusive ISIS leader would be a major victory for the US-led coalition but officials said it could take time to confirm the reports."I can't absolutely confirm that Baghdadi has been killed," General Nicholas Houghton, the chief of staff of the British armed forces, told BBC television on Sunday.

"Probably it will take some days to have absolute confirmation," he said. A spokesman for US Central Command, which oversees American forces in the ME, said the raids had intentionally targeted the group's leadership.The aim was to squeeze the group and ensure it had "increasingly limited freedom to manoeuvre, communicate and command," he added.Meanwhile, a senior Iraqi officer said that government forces now hold "more than 70 percent" of the key oil town of Baiji, which is near where Iraqi soldiers have been holding out for months against a jihadist siege of Iraq's largest oil refinery.The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group, meanwhile  said that fighting for the town of Kobane in Syria had now killed more than 1,000 people, most of them jihadists.