This week, 1,000 paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne will be sent to Iraq on what is being called a “training mission” for the Iraqi Army. The troops will join 250 from the same brigade already there.
This deployment was announced back in December as part of the 1,500 additional troops President Obama approved for the ISIS war at the time. Officials have refused to say where these troops will exactly deploy.
Some of the US ground troops already in Iraq have faced indirect fire from ISIS, and as more troops are added, so too does the chance that they will come into direct contact with ISIS forces on the ground.
The only Western ground troops to engage ISIS so far were Canadian special forces who, like the US forces, were supposed to be strictly in the nation for training purposes.
Just another day at the office…
US go home !
The reaction of the Iraqi Army in the face of ISIS was just…embarrassing. We can make noise about all the reasons for it, but the fact that we were already paying to train and equip the Iraqi military for many years and turned out it was all time and money basically flushed down the toilet. Except for the companies who make a mint off of this operation.