PEACE campaigners warned of a dangerous escalation yesterday after US officials said that military advisers would soon be sent to Syria.

President Barack Obama has reportedly ordered fewer than 50 US special forces troops to northern Syria to work with US-backed rebel forces fighting Islamic State (Isis).

While none of the Syrian war’s many factions was named, the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) control most of the region along the border with Turkey apart from an Isis-controlled stretch from the west bank of the Euphrates river to the besieged city of Aleppo.

A smaller but more densely populated area of northern Idlib province west of Aleppo is also under rebel control. The al-Qaida-affiliated Nusra Front dominates smaller groups there including the Free Syrian Army.

“There is a growing sense of mission creep around the Syria operation,” said Stop the War Coalition vice-chairman Chris Nineham.

“Last week it was revealed that US forces are engaged in active operations on the ground. Now there’s an increase in special advisers. We need a political solution, not a wider war.”

Air strikes by the US-led coalition against Isis have been almost entirely ineffective over the last 18 months, while a $500 million (£324m) scheme to train “moderate” rebels only swelled the Islamist group’s ranks.

A Russian air campaign launched on September 30 has turned the tide of the war, with around 50 jets flying up to 90 sorties a day between them.

The US has only made one air raid in the past week. Isis and the Nusra Front took advantage of the lull to stage a major counteroffensive to the south of Aleppo.

Mr Obama was expected to publicly confirm the dangerous move later yesterday, as 18-nation talks on a political solution to the conflict continued in Vienna.

The gathered foreign ministers were considering a new plan to negotiate a ceasefire in four to six months, followed by the formation of a transitional government including President Bashar al-Assad and opposition members.

Anti-Isis campaigner and another Syrian found murdered

TWO Syrians, one a member of an anti-Islamic State (Isis) group, were found murdered in the southern Turkish city of Sanliurfa yesterday.

The group Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently did not say when Ibrahim Abdul-Qadir and Fares Hamadi were killed, but blamed Isis for the killings.

Raqqa in central Syria is Isis’s de facto capital and a target of Russian air attacks.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi army was forced to temporarily halt its offensive to retake from Isis the major city of Ramadi in Anbar province after heavy rains and flooding.

Ramadi fell to Isis in May after more than a year of fighting.

On Thursday, a barrage of rockets hit a former US military base housing an exiled Iranian opposition group near Baghdad airport.

Mujahedeen-e-Khalq said that 20 of its members had been killed at Camp Liberty along with three Iraqi soldiers.