ISIS doesn’t want to pick a fight with the US Marine Corps.
Via FOX News
Islamic State fighters reportedly seized most of a western Iraqi town on Thursday, in fighting taking place mere miles from an air base where hundreds of U.S. Marines are training Iraqis.[…]
The Al Asad air base is where 320 U.S. Marines are stationed training Iraqi forces. It is a mere 13-minute drive from al-Baghdadi to the base.
“It bears watching,” retired Col. Thomas Lynch, a National Defense University fellow, told Fox News, regarding the reports out of Iraq.
But he stressed that for the fighters to pose a threat to the base, they’d have to get through the perimeter. While “it’s not impossible,” Lynch said, to do it they would have to amass a large number of fighters – which would make them “vulnerable” to airstrikes.
The area in Anbar Province has long been a hot zone of fighting as ISIS looks to hold and expand its self-declared caliphate in Iraq and Syria. In January, the Pentagon first confirmed that U.S. troops at the Al Asad base had been coming under regular mortar fire.
To date, those attacks have been described as ineffective. A senior U.S. official told Fox News the base receives “low-scale” indirect fire from time to time.
“We continue to support efforts by Iraqi Security Forces, working in conjunction with tribal fighters, directed against ISIL in the province,” the DOD spokeswoman said Thursday.
HT Breaking911