The ghost of LBJ has emerged.
The 450 additional U.S. troops in Iraq will be working face to face with both their Iraqi counterparts and Sunni Muslim tribal fighters to help plan operations against the Islamic State group rather than focusing on training, the chief of staff of American operations there said Friday.
In the past, U.S. advisers had the clumsy arrangement of communicating with their Iraqi counterparts by phone through a translator, Marine Brig. Gen. Thomas Weidley, chief of staff of U.S. operations in Iraq and Syria, said during a Pentagon briefing.
“The fact that we’re able to get on the ground with our counterparts in the operations centers with the tribal leaders together face to face and day in day out provides us great benefit,” he said.
The troops will be working in Anbar province, a shift away from the earlier U.S. focus on retaking the northern city of Mosul, which the Islamic State still controls. Weidley would not say anything about a timeline for retaking Mosul or Ramadi, a far cry from the bullish U.S. predictions early in the fight that Mosul would be retaken before the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which began Thursday.
There are now roughly 3,500 U.S. troops in Iraq, a number that has been steadily climbing as Islamic State militants have proven resilient, especially in Iraq, where they still control a large swath of territory across the country despite recent setbacks in Syria at the hands of Kurdish fighters.