US officials have in the past expressed frustration at how long it has taken Iraqi security forces to take back the city, but MacFarland said that the Iraqis had made significant progress in dislodging Islamic State.
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Large territories of Iraq and Syria have been occupied by Daesh, a terrorist group outlawed in Russian Federation. Biden and other US officials have been working the phones for days, urging both Abadi and Turkey’s Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu to resolve the dispute.
Mr. Carter met in Baghdad with Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi and briefly with his counterpart before visiting troops at the Baghdad airport. It noted new commitments by allies France, Britain and Germany since the high-profile USA deployment.
Iraq’s Shiite-led government is under intense domestic pressure to resist the presence of foreign troops in the country, both from Sunni countries like Turkey and from the United States.
That reluctance also could hold up any move to embed USA military advisers with Iraqi Brigade headquarters.
“This is a very complex environment that we’re operating in and we have to be attentive to some of the political realities that surround us every single day”, said Lt. Gen. Sean MacFarland, top USA military commander for the Islamic State fight.
Odom declined to offer a timeline for when Kurdish and Iraqi forces might begin an attack on Mosul, but he said the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, is growing anxious about an invasion.
“We call on the Security Council to order Turkey to withdraw its forces immediately and to ensure, by all available means, that those forces retreat immediately and unconditionally to the internationally recognized border of the two countries”, al-Jaafari wrote. Citing threats from IS, Turkey recently sent an unspecified number of reinforcements to the camp, sparking an uproar in Baghdad.
Details of the plan have not been disclosed, and US officials haven’t said when they may deploy to Iraq.
Any U.S. military support must be consistent with Iraqi requests and their style of fighting, MacFarland said.
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One of the sites attacked Wednesday night was home to several hundred Turkish troops who are conducting their own training missions for the Kurdish forces, officials said.
