Officials use different language to describe the mission for new troops headed to Iraq.
The White House says the new batch of troops deploying to Iraq are going to train Iraqi recruits to fight the Islamic State. The Pentagon says the 450 American personnel headed to Al-Taqaddum Air Base are going over just as advisers.
The “advisers and assisters,” said Defense Department spokesman Col. Steve Warren, “will work with the 8th Iraqi Army Division and advise them on how to do everything from best deploy their troops, to improve their logistics systems, to improve their intelligence capabilities, to how to manage their administrative processes.”
The White House described the deployment differently.
“By opening this training mission essentially in the neighborhood where we want these Sunni tribal fighters to fight, we can make it easier for them to get training and equipment in Anbar province and then go carry out the fight in Anbar province,” press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters on Wednesday.
The mixed signals come as President Barack Obama struggles to find a balance between achieving his goal of “degrading and ultimately destroying” the terrorist group known as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant while avoiding restarting a war in Iraq that he has worked to end since he became president in 2009.
His administration has repeatedly said that the U.S. can’t fight Iraq’s battles for it, and more recently blamed Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s government for failing to provide adequate Iraqi forces, especially from the Sunni tribal regions. On Wednesday, the White House cast the new “training mission” in the Sunni stronghold of Anbar as a way to speed the flow of local forces to the front lines against the Islamic State.
But the Pentagon ruled out drill sergeants.
There are some sites in Iraq “where we teach Iraqi soldiers how to do basic combat tasks — for example, how to shoot,” Warren said. “What this site that we’re talking about, here in Al-Taqaddum … will not do that. That’s what it will not do.”
It may just be a matter of semantics: One man’s “trainer” could be another’s “adviser.” But the Pentagon’s communications have notably avoided the T-word as consistently as the White House’s have employed it.
Asked about the linguistic discrepancy, National Security Council spokesman Alistair Baskey said training could still be in the mix. “The new U.S. force presence at Taqaddum will be primarily to advise and assist initially in response to the most pressing needs of the Iraqis, which are to consolidate and organize to counterattack ISIL, but this does not preclude training as well when the need arises, particularly of tribal fighters.”
Warren also noted that the influx of advisers could “help us to identify Sunni tribal militia elements that, when all the conditions are right, we will be able to train.”
It might be some time before the conditions are right. The 450 troops the U.S. is sending to Al-Taqaddum over the next two months will not be equipped for that training mission, nor are there facilities at the base to support one.
And it’s unclear when there’ll be any trainees to learn from any American trainers or advisers.
“One of the things that we’re still seeing is — in Iraq — places where we’ve got more training capacity than we have recruits,” Obama said Monday, explaining why he does not yet have a “complete strategy” for fighting ISIL.
Earnest acknowledged on Wednesday that sluggish recruitment of Sunni tribal fighters still an issue.
“By establishing the training mission closer to where the fighting is occurring,” he said, the administration hopes to make it “easier and more efficient for specific Iraqi security forces to go through this training process and then be deployed to the fight more promptly and more efficiently.”
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