This Week, US Will Send 1,000 More Ground Troops to Iraq

Paratroopers to Be Sent on 'Training Mission'

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.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.