U.S. Central Command Gen. Ken McKenzie has repeatedly said of late that the American force of 5,200 soldiers in Iraq will be drawing down soon, but the fight against the Islamic State is not yet complete and will not be turned over to Iraqi Armed Forces alone.
That point was underscored over the weekend, when Operation Inherent Resolve reported that coalition aircraft destroyed three rural ISIS camps.
“Airstrikes help destroy ISIS targets in terrain difficult to reach by standard vehicles,” said Col. Myles B. Caggins III, coalition military spokesman in a statement Saturday, which included links to videos of the airstrikes.
The strikes took place in a rural area of Kirkuk province known to be a hiding place for ISIS terrorists. OIR said that ever since ISIS was deprived of its caliphate in March 2019, it has been driven to inaccessible desert and mountain regions.
The release also clarified that the strikes were at the request and in coordination with the Iraqi government. OIS did not immediately respond to additional questions by the Washington Examiner.
The United States and the Iraqi government are currently in the third week of negotiations that will decide the future of U.S. forces in Iraq and how soon the 250,000-strong Iraqi armed forces will be facing ISIS alone.
Some 500 NATO trainers and support staff are helping prepare Iraqi forces to fight ISIS, but unlike U.S. troops, NATO troops do not provide firepower or counterterrorism operations support.
“NATO Mission Iraq is a noncombat mission mandated to carry out advising, training, and capacity-building activities,” a NATO official told the Washington Examiner Monday.
“Its personnel is therefore not embedded with Iraqi security forces carrying out combat operations,” the official added, clarifying that the NATO mission does not provide “kinetic-support activities” like those provided by the U.S. contingent.
The call to replace U.S. forces in Iraq with NATO forces without changing their mission would leave the Iraqis to fight ISIS on their own, something they are not doing presently, McKenzie said last week.
“I think our numbers are going to get smaller, and we would want them to get smaller as the Iraqis become more comfortable executing operations,” McKenzie told Washington Post columnist David Ignatius in an Aspen Security Forum virtual discussion Thursday.
“ISIS, while substantively defeated, certainly, as a ground holding organization, still has the capability to pose threats in Iraq and in Syria,” he added, underscoring that the Iraqi government supports a continued U.S. troop presence. “They know that we still provide very, very good support for them as they continue operations against ISIS.”
