The news comes on the heels of the Pentagon’s admission that the letter informing Iraq’s Defense Ministry that U.S.-led coalition troops would leave Iraq “was a mistake.”<\/p>\n
“A draft unsigned letter that was acquired by an Iraqi official has no import. It has no value whatsoever,” Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said Tuesday in an interview with CNN.<\/p>\n
“I will say this, the United States is not withdrawing from Iraq. In fact, in my conversations with my counterpart, the Iraqi defense minister, I conveyed to him that we do want to stay in Iraq and we want to continue the important defeat ISIS mission,” he added.<\/p>\n
“That letter is a draft, it was a mistake, it was unsigned, it should never have been released,” Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley told reporters at the Pentagon on Monday.<\/p>\n
“Poorly worded, implies withdrawal,” Milley said. “That is not what’s happening,” he continued.<\/p>\n
Alongside Milley, Esper told reporters earlier in the day that the U.S. was “repositioning forces throughout the region.”<\/p>\n
Article source: https:\/\/www.cnbc.com\/2020\/01\/07\/confusion-builds-over-letter-on-us-troop-withdrawal-in-iraq.html<\/a>\r\n<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The news comes on the heels of the Pentagon’s admission that the letter informing Iraq’s Defense Ministry that U.S.-led coalition troops would leave Iraq “was a mistake.” “A draft unsigned letter that was acquired by an Iraqi official has no import. It has no value whatsoever,” Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said Tuesday in an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[84],"class_list":["post-202240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-political","tag-political"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=202240"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202240\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=202240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=202240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=202240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}