From the very beginning of the fight against ISIS in Iraq, President Obama has maintained that it would not be a large-scale ground war. "I want the American people to understand how this effort will be different from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan," he said in his "degrade and destroy" speech. "It will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil."
And by the Pentagon's official tally, the Obama administration has mostly kept that promise. There are officially 3,650 U.S. troops in Iraq, a significant drop from the tens of thousands stationed there from the 2003 invasion to the early years of Obama's presidency.
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