The Slatest

U.S. Will Send More Troops to Iraq As Presence on the Ground Increases

A 10th Mountain Division soldier plugs his ears while comrades fire a 105mm Howitzer during a training mission for future conflicts on May 18, 2016 at Fort Drum, New York.

Photo by John Moore/Getty Images

The U.S. military presence in Iraq continues to expand. On Monday, Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced 560 more troops would be deployed to assist in the coalition effort to retake Mosul as part of its sustained push to expel ISIS from the country. With this latest round of deployments, the total official U.S. military presence in Iraq now stands at 4,647, although including temporary deployments the number is slightly higher.

The Obama administration has gone out of its way to make clear it does not consider U.S. personnel on the ground “troops” per se, instead referring to them as “advisers” or “trainers,” but as Fred Kaplan pointed out in April, the pull back into combat has been strong. U.S. involvement is still well below the 130,000 troops that were stationed in Iraq during the thick of the fighting there, but the lingering ground presence runs counter to President Obama’s campaign promise to extract the U.S. from the conflict in Iraq.

Of course, the situation on the ground has changed since the Saddam days and the conflict has morphed into a fight against ISIS, now the focus of the American military in Iraq. After two years of ISIS advances in Iraq, the Islamist group has suffered a series of defeats that has left it vulnerable. “Mosul is now the only major city in the country that the Iraqis do not control, and the Islamic State has not seized any substantial new territory since May 2015,” according to the New York Times. While losing territory, however, the group has launched deadly bombing attacks in Baghdad.