History
Most special operations troops in the old Iraqi army were almost all Sunni Arabs, selected for their loyalty to Saddam Hussein, and sometimes used against their own people. Because of this, the current Iraqi commando force had to be recruited from scratch, mostly from Kurds and Shia Arabs. In November 2005, after two years of training in Jordan with Jordanian and US Army Special Forces, the Iraqi Special Operations Force had 1440 men trained, composed into two combat battalions and two support battalions.
In March 2008, the force consisted of a single brigade which in turn was made up of an Iraqi National Counter-Terrorism Force (INCTF) battalion, three Commando battalions, a support battalion and a special reconnaissance unit.
Read more about this topic: Iraqi Special Operations Forces
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man’s right to his body, or woman’s right to her soul.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“Properly speaking, history is nothing but the crimes and misfortunes of the human race.”
—Pierre Bayle (1647–1706)
“The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it.”
—Lytton Strachey (1880–1932)