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September 30th, 2014 
David Schulberg 
Soldiers of the 1st Combat Arms Battalion 16th Infantry Regiment, 1st Brigade, 1st Infantry Division, halt movement during the 1st CAB, 16th Inf. Reg. award ceremony held at Ft. Riley, January 31, 2012. (Army Photo by Staff Sgt. Robert DeDeaux)
Sep 25, 2014 | by Richard Sisk
About 500 troops from the U.S. Army‘s 1st Infantry Division in Fort Riley, Kansas, will head to Iraq and other countries in the Middle East next month to help coordinate the campaign against the Islamic State, the Pentagon said Thursday.
More than 200 hundred of the soldiers will be based in Iraq at U.S. Joint Operations Centers (JOCs) in Baghdad and the Kurdish capital of Irbil, and the rest of the contingent will operate out of U.S. bases in the region under the U.S. Central Command, Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, said at a Pentagon briefing.
The initial plan was to have 138 of the troops at the operations center in Baghdad, 68 at the operations center in Irbil and 10 at the Iraqi Defense Ministry, Kirby said. The 200-plus troops will be part of the 475-troop contingent President Barack Obama authorized last month to serve in Iraq as advisers to the Iraqi National Security forces and the Kurdish Peshmerga forces.
However, the 200 from the 1st ID will not “embed” with the other advisers at the brigade and headquarters levels with the Iraqi and Kurdish forces, Kirby said. Instead, the 1st ID troops will perform duties at the JOCs, he said.
Last week, Gen. Ray Odierno, the Army Chief of Staff, said he had signed off on “sending another division headquarters to Iraq to control what we’re doing there, a small headquarters.” The division headquarters would be the first to deploy to Iraq since the 2011 withdrawal of U.S. forces from the country.
Source Article from http://friendsofsyria.co/2014/09/30/us-army-to-deploy-hundreds-of-fort-riley-soldiers-to-iraq/
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