President Barack Obama insisted yesterday that US troops have no combat mission in Iraq, after his top general suggested some US advisors could join Iraqi forces to fight the Islamic State group.
“The American forces that have been deployed to Iraq do not and will not have a combat mission,” Obama told American troops at the headquarters of US Central Command in Florida.
Obama has repeatedly stressed that, despite ordering air strikes against IS in Syria and Iraq, he will not send US troops back to fight another land war in the region.
But his remarks at the Macdill Airforce base yesterday were lent added relevance by comments by General Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Tuesday.
Dempsey said that it may at some point prove necessary to send US advisors into action with the Iraqi troops battling IS, in what he called “close-combat advising”.
But the White House insisted the idea of US troops in battle was a “purely hypothetical scenario.”
