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Report: US Moves Arms to Kuwait, Gears Up for Assault on ISIS
Tuesday, December 30, 2014 09:53 AM
By: James Morrison
The United States is moving massive amounts of weapons and other military equipment from Afghanistan to Kuwait to prepare for an assault on the terrorist army of the Islamic State across the Kuwaiti border in Iraq, according to U.S. News and World Report.
The equipment, left over from the U.S. war in Afghanistan, includes more than 3,000 vehicles that are heavily armed to protect them against landmines and ambushes.
President Obama has ordered most U.S. forces in Afghanistan to return home by the end of the year, leaving about 10,000 troops to provide support for the Iraqi military.
“From June to December, we’ve worked a lot on moving items into Kuwait,” Air Force Maj. Gen. Rowayne Schatz, director of operations and plans for the U.S. Transformation Command, told the news weekly.
“The Army is holding the gear there, and it has room to hold it, as the mission fleshes out.”
The United States is returning about 3,000 troops to Iraq, after pulling out all combat forces three years ago. The troops are supposed to advise the Iraqi military in its war against ISIS, which has imposed a reign of terror over large swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria.
U.S. officials are expecting Iraq to mount a spring offensive against ISIS, and the equipment stockpiled in Kuwait will be moved into Iraq to support the action.
Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress in September that he would consider deploying more U.S. troops to Iraq if needed to stop the ISIS advance toward Baghdad.
“We left Iraq, and we left it with some things undone,” he told the House Armed Services Committee.
Dempsey conceded that the United States should have secured Iraqi permission to leave a sizable American force behind to help train the military. He called the Iraqi military leadership “largely dysfunctional.”
