Will Trump Send More Troops To Iraq, Syria? Military Officials To Present Options To President Friday

Eradicating the Islamic State terror group, also known as ISIS, played a significant role in Donald Trump’s presidential campaign last year. Now, the new commander-in-chief is reportedly expected to meet with Defense Department officials Friday to find out ways to “accelerate” the fight against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, Military Times reported.

Officials told the website that some of the options likely to be presented to Trump - like “significantly” more U.S. troops on the ground and more aid to Kurdish fighters battling the terror group – were ones previously given to former President Barack Obama but that his administration didn’t employ.

Going deeper, one of the options could be deploying more Apache helicopters – one of the most advanced of its kind and used by other militaries around the world like Israel and Egypt – as well as giving the military “broader authority” during combat, officials who weren’t authorized to discuss the matter told the website.

Another choice could be rolling out an Army brigade to Syria to take ISIS’s headquarters in Raqqa, located roughly 99 miles east of Aleppo, the site of massive civilian casualties and airstrikes by U.S. and Russian forces.

Currently, the U.S. has a little more than 5,100 troops in Iraq and 500 in Syria, according to Military Times.

Throughout his campaign and recently, Trump has explained what he would have done about ISIS if he were in Obama’s shoes.

"We should have kept the oil when we got out. And you know, it's very interesting. Had we taken the oil, you wouldn't have ISIS, because they fuel themselves with the oil. That's where they got the money," Trump told ABC News's David Muir in an interview aired Wednesday. "We should have taken the oil. You wouldn't have ISIS if we took the oil."

During the campaign, Trump also pledged to “bomb the hell out of ISIS,” and in an interview Fox News Thursday he called the group that’s terrorized northern Iraq and Syria for the last several years “sneaky rats.”

“We have evil that lurks around the corner without the uniforms,” Trump said. “Ours is harder because the people we’re going against they don’t wear uniforms. They’re sneaky, dirty rats and they blow people up in a shopping center and they blow people up in a church.”