(17 Apr 2019) LEADIN:
The Iraqi Army's 55th Brigade is receiving combat training to defuse any lingering threats from the Islamic State group.
A month after the defeat of the IS group in Syria and Iraq, the 2000-strong brigade remains on guard.
STORYLINE:
This is no ordinary operation. It's the grand finale of eight weeks of intensive training.
The Iraqi Army 55th Brigade is the latest group to receive combat training from Australian, New Zealand, and Singaporean coalition forces, at the Taji military base, north of Baghdad.
Their mission: to extract the "militants" - played by actors - from their position in the desert.
Trading pretend fire with the soldiers, the "militants" were too distracted to notice the column of infantry moving quickly around their right flank.
With the ambush set, the soldiers pounced, and the "militants" hastily withdrew. It's a box ticked for the brigade, who have been training for weeks for the operation.
Although the guns and mortars fired blanks, the manoeuvres were real - a display of some of the tactics drilled into the brigade over the last two months.
A month after the defeat of the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq, the US-led international coalition is training Iraqi forces to secure the country against IS cells still operating in the countryside.
Colonel Jason Groat is commander of the Task Group Taji 8 force drilling the Iraqi army.
He says they need to stay on their toes.
"While the physical caliphate of Daesh has been defeated, Daesh is still in insurgency mode at this stage," he says.
"So our job is to keep the Iraqi security forces' training up to speed and make sure they can defeat Daesh whatever phase of the war they happen to be in."
He uses the Arabic acronym for the IS group, which lost the last pocket of its so-called caliphate to coalition-backed forces, in March.
At its height, around 2015, the IS group commanded a caliphate pseudo state that stretched across northern Syria and Iraq and included Mosul, one of Iraq's largest cities, and Raqqa, a provincial capital in north Syria.
Today, the group is a shadow of its former self - it no longer holds towns and cities as it once did - but it still mounts kidnappings, ambushes, and assassinations in rural Iraq.
Training the army is a core objective of the international coalition's deployment to Iraq. Poorly trained and under funded in the decade after the 2003 invasion of their country, the army disintegrated in the face of the Islamic State group's advance in 2014.
It was then that the Iraqi Parliament voted to invite international forces back into the country, to turn the tide in the war against IS.
But with the IS group now defeated in its pseudo state form, the talk in Baghdad has turned once again to whether foreign forces should be ordered out of Iraq.
It would mean losing the approximately 5,200 U.S. troops supporting mop-up operations in the countryside in north and central Iraq - and, possibly, forfeiting the training course run by Task Group Taji 8.
Task Group Taji 8 has 340 soldiers in its group and has trained 44,000 Iraqi soldiers since 2015.
Colonel Groat says it's prepared to continue its mission training Iraqi forces as long as there is interest and support from the Iraqi government.
"We'll be here until the job is done," he says.
"We're here at the invitation of the Iraqi government. At the moment, the Iraqi government is willing and able to ensure the coalition continues to train Iraqi security forces, so until that situation changes, we intend to remain."
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