The US military is requesting authority to send up to 500 new troops to Iraq ahead of a much-anticipated campaign to take back Mosul from Islamic State, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.
“The new deployment would bring the overall U.S. presence to as high as 6,400,” it said, noting that the troops the Pentagon sends to Iraq aren’t heading into direct combat, but they will be there in an advise-and-assist mission.
“While they are armed and always have the authority to defend themselves on the battlefield, they aren’t performing direct action missions,” officials were quoted as repeatedly saying.
The US move would come in the wake of an operation that began Tuesday by Iraqi forces in Shirqat, a town north of Baghdad, to further degrade the supply lines of the so-called ‘Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) into Mosul. That operation, which was announced by Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi in New York, where he is participating in U.N. General Assembly meetings, is a further indication that the Iraqi forces are preparing for the larger fight in Mosul, a city of about one million people.
“The new U.S. forces would increase the number of American personnel officially deployed to Iraq from 4,400 to about 4,900,” WSJ said, adding that “the Pentagon also maintains up to 1,500 additional U.S. forces that it doesn’t acknowledge as part of its Iraq force, most at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad or on temporary assignments.”
“The new deployment would bring the overall U.S. presence to as high as 6,400. The 500 would be in addition to roughly 400 new personnel the U.S. sent to Iraq in early September to prepare for the Mosul offensive,” it highlighted.
President Barack Obama hasn’t yet been presented with the military plan, according to U.S. officials.
Advise-and-assist forces operate under instructions to remain “one terrain feature” behind any battle, meaning they must stay some distance behind the front lines of fighting and serve only in an advisory role. However, there have been instances in which U.S. troops have been killed or injured while operating under these strict guidelines.
The newspaper, moreover, said “most of the new troops would be assigned to an area the US military has established south of Mosul at a logistics hub known as “Q-West” near the city of Qayara. Hundreds of US and coalition forces have massed there in the past several months in anticipation of the Mosul fight.”
The fight for Mosul—seen as the biggest battle yet against ISIL—has been delayed for more than a year. Abadi recently has signaled he wants the city taken by the end of the year.
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