US Navy SEAL Team Active in Iraq, Trump Tweet Reveals

The locations of US Navy SEAL teams are closely guarded secrets, and it is rarely reported where they are operating. Instead, we mostly get reports after the fact of what a team has done, and by then it is assumed they’re long gone.

But SEAL Team Five, it turns out, is operating in western Iraq. This was revealed during Wednesday’s visit by President Trump to al-Asad Air Base, where he was photographed with a man who identified himself as the chaplain for the SEAL team.

A lot of the media coverage centers around this revelation happening during the Trump visit, with the implication that the president had blown their cover. Of course, the chaplain was the one who specifically identified himself in front of a number of reporters and photographers in the first place.

And either way, the how of what happened is less important than the revelation itself. Wit fighting dying down in Iraq, all signs publicly have been that the US is transitioning to a training-focused military effort in the country. If a SEAL team is actively operating in Iraq, that’s clearly not the whole story, and there is clearly some sort of clandestine combat operation being carried out.