BAGHDAD: Iraqi forces battling jihadis on several fronts Thursday were poised to receive the help of 450 extra U.S. soldiers slated for deployment near Ramadi.

Washington’s decision to send more advisers and trainers to Iraq has failed to silence critics who say the White House lacks a strategy to combat ISIS.

A year after a jihadi offensive saw the government lose swaths of Iraq, military operations to weaken ISIS were experiencing mixed fortunes.

The autonomous Kurdistan region’s peshmerga forces pushed south and west of Kirkuk on the back of intensive bombing by Iraqi and U.S.-led coalition warplanes, security officials said.

One of the targets was a bomb-making workshop ISIS had set up after their main car bomb factory in nearby Hawijah was completely leveled in a coalition airstrike, one official said.

The June 3 strike caused an explosion that was heard 50 kilometers away and destroyed what some officials said was ISIS’ largest such plant in Iraq and Syria.

Federal troops and the Popular Mobilization forces – an umbrella for mostly Shiite militias and volunteers – also continued operations aimed at securing Beiji, north of Baghdad.

The area has seen relentless fighting over the past year and loyalists in recent days achieved some progress in pushing ISIS fighters out of the town of Beiji as well as from the nearby refinery, the country’s largest.

Anti-ISIS forces launched a wide-ranging military operation early Thursday to clear “the last ISIS pockets along the Tigris River” around Beiji, an army major general said.

Establishing firm control over Beiji is seen as key to isolating ISIS in the vast western province of Anbar, whose reconquest is Baghdad’s declared priority. The jihadis beat the government to the punch, seizing provincial capital Ramadi on May 17 and dealing Baghdad its worst setback in almost a year.

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi vowed to swiftly retake Ramadi but operations have been sluggish and questions are still being asked about the security forces’ ability following their chaotic retreat from the city.

U.S. President Barack Obama Wednesday approved the deployment of 450 more troops to Iraq, in what would nudge the ranks of Washington’s “train, advise and assist” mission above 3,500.

The new contingent will be based at Taqaddum Air Base, nestled along the Euphrates River between jihadi-held Ramadi and Fallujah.

“There is always a risk whenever we’re in Iraq that we could be hit with indirect fire, as we have in the past, that we could be attacked,” said senior Pentagon official Elissa Slotkin.

The U.S. is also considering replicating the creation of a new U.S. military hub in Anbar elsewhere in Iraq, the top U.S. military officer said Thursday.

“It’s another one of the options that we’re considering,” Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a small group of reporters before landing in Naples, Italy, acknowledging that this might require more troops.

Dempsey said examination of such a possibility was “just part of prudent planning.”

Dempsey described the Taqaddum base as a “lily pad” for the U.S. military to expand farther in Iraq to help encourage and enable Iraqi forces to battle ISIS. He said planning for other such sites was not just at the theoretical level.

“At the planning level, it’s not theoretical. It’s very practical, looking at geographic locations, road networks, airfields, places where we can actually establish these hubs,” Dempsey said.

Dempsey did not see another such site in Anbar province anytime soon.

“But I could conceive of one potentially somewhere in the corridor that runs from Baghdad to Tikrit to Kirkuk and over into Mosul. So we’re looking at that area,” Dempsey said.

The plan to expand the 3,100-strong U.S. contingent in Iraq and open a new operations center closer to the fighting in Anbar province marks an adjustment in strategy for Obama, who has faced mounting pressure to do more to blunt the momentum of the insurgents.

Dempsey, who has long warned about the limits of U.S. military power in Iraq, expressed confidence that the latest deployments to Taqaddum would help advance Iraq’s military campaign against ISIS.

But the real test was whether Iraq could mend a sectarian rift, something that was up to the country’s political leaders.

“When people say: ‘Is this a game changer? This new partner capacity site?’ No. It’s an extension of an existing campaign that makes the campaign more credible,” Dempsey said.

“The game changers are going to have to come from the Iraqi government themselves.”

The U.S.-led coalition has carried out close to 4,500 airstrikes since August and undertaken training to reform a security apparatus that completely folded when ISIS swept in a year ago.

Obama, who admitted the United States did not “yet have a complete strategy,” has come under intense criticism for allowing chaos to spiral in the region.

“I support the tactical move the president is taking, but where’s the overarching strategy?” asked House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner, reacting to the announcement on the latest reinforcements.

The Soufan Group risk consultancy said seven years of U.S. military presence following the 2003 invasion and billions of dollars invested in training and equipment had not prevented disaster.

“The logistics, non-commissioned officer cadre, and command and control that effective militaries depend upon were always missing from the new Iraqi army,” it said.