Pentagon Sent Thousands More Soldiers to Iraq and Syria – and Lying to Us About It

(The AEGIS Alliance) – When the Pentagon is talking about numbers in Iraq and Syria, it is always the same story. There’s about 5,262 U.S. soldiers in Iraq and 503 in Syria they say. It does not really matter that 1000’s of additional soldiers had been well known to have been added since those figures had been invented, they are still ‘current’ figures.

As up to date as reporters ever get at least. Although, the Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC), is required to offer quarterly reports for U.S. overseas deployments. It appears the DMDC doesn’t have the luxury of just fabricating numbers in order to suit the narratives.

This quickly reveals something already known, that the Pentagon’s reported figures that were meant for the American public were just flat out lies. In reality, there are reportedly 1,720 U.S. soldiers in Syria and 8,892 in Iraq, as current as September, and the numbers have only been rising since then.

“The U.S. has almost 26,000 troops deployed total in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, according to a new DoD report, far exceeding the Pentagon’s previously acknowledged troop levels overseas.” – the Military Times said yesterday.

However, this recent more accurate figure from the DMDC, along with it being out of date by months, is actually the low end of the true figure. This is since buried beneath the per-country deployments is a different number, 29,092 U.S. soldiers, whose locations are simply put as ‘unknown.’

This also seems as though it should be a bigger scandal than it is. This figure, being understood but not being made directly apparent, is admitting that somewhere around 10% of U.S. soldiers who are deployed overseas are deployed in a way so secretive that even the reports which are responsible for accounting where all of them are has no idea where they might actually be.

Kyle James Lee – The AEGIS Alliance – This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.