Capt. Issac Gipson of Biloxi, Mississippi, stands in front of a Patriot missile battery of the 5th Bat. 52nd Regiment of Air Defense Artillery at Camp New Jersey in the Kuwaiti desert, March 17, 2003. (AP/Jean-Marc Bouju)
The US is in the process of deploying air defense systems to Iraq to protect US troops in case of a potential Iranian attack, the head of U.S. Central Command General Kenneth McKenzie said on March 10.
“We are also in the process of bringing air defense systems, ballistic missile defense systems, into Iraq in particular, to protect ourselves against another potential Iranian attack,” General McKenzie said.
Earlier in 2020, the Pentagon announced that it was planning to get an Iraqi permission to deploy Patriot missile defenses into the country to better defend US forces.
The US military buildup followed a military escalation with Iran in the region. On January 3, a US strike assassinated Major General Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Qods Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps, and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the second-in-command of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units in Bahdad. In response to this act of the agression, Iran carried out a missile attack on US military bases in Iraq on January 8. After this, the US military continue its military buildup in the region with an increasing scale.
