Us to create paramilitary force in iraq as part of US campaign against Isis
By Chris Morris
22 December 2014
In March 2012, the US military began what it called a "signature" operation to liberate Iraq of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil). The objective was to remove the militants from Iraq's "caliphate"우리카지노 that they had established, and to create a new federal state with a government based on federalism, national citizenship and gender equality. The first task was to prepare a force that would serve as a "counterforce," the American military's euphemism for the centralised forces used in the invasion, and to train and equip hundreds of officers and soldiers from the local police and army.
The operation's initial goal was "liberating" the city of Falluja, a Syria더킹카지노n city at the centre of Iraq's sectarian conflict, in the west of the country. The city was a "key transit우리카지노 area" linking Iraq's predominantly Sunni areas in the north to the main cities of Baghdad and the capital. It is also the hometown of the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, an ally of Saddam Hussein and, on the eve of the 2003 war, a key instigator in the US campaign to invade Iraq.
Since then, the city has been a key strategic point. On Saturday, August 16, US-led forces launched a suicide raid on the airbase there, killing as many as 40 members of the Iraqi special forces based there. In the wake of the raid and the deaths, the Pentagon announced that it had decided to establish a "special operations task force" there, where members of an eight-person joint command will be directed to prepare forces for a series of strikes to be launched over several months.
In Falluja, an American special forces team, and others were preparing the forces they would deploy to retake it. But the force's initial task was to train the locals, and to bring in troops from the Iraqi armed forces who had fled from that city to support the forces being trained by the US military.
There are at least five local army units operating in Falluja. Of the 12 officers and soldiers from the local forces, most are part of the local Baath Party, which controls the city and the surrounding district around it, according to accounts from several officers on the ground. The other 12 are all of the Iraqi army and Kurdish Peshmerga forces. "We had to bring in our officers," a local police official, who was not named, said in
