US President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania on Wednesday night made a surprise visit to Iraq to greet American soldiers stationed in the country. This is his first visit to Iraq as the US President. "I want to come and pay my respects most importantly to the great soldiers, great troopers we have here," Trump told a pool of reporters travelling with him. He stayed in the country for a few hours.
While in Iraq, Trump met with US military leaders and spoke to troops at the Al-Asad Air Base, a joint US-Iraqi military base west of Baghdad. A scheduled in-person meeting with Iraq's Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi was cancelled.
Trump's travel to Iraq was made public after he finished giving remarks to a group of about 100 mostly US special operations troops engaged in combat operations in Iraq and Syria. When asked why he wanted to come to Iraq, Trump told reporters before a meeting with military leaders on base: "It's a place I have been talking about for many many years. I was talking about it as a civilian".
Trump travelled to Iraq unannounced during a partial government shutdown. "We actually had a couple of set-ups but were cancelled for security reasons because people were finding out. Pretty sad when you spend seven trillion (US) dollars in the Middle East and going in has to be under this massive cover with planes all over and all of the greatest equipment in the world and you do everything to get in safely," he said, expressing his dissatisfaction over the current situation in the region. PTI
