Netherlands extends Iraq, Peshmerga training mission through 2021

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Dutch military trainers and advisors will  stay in Iraq and the Kurdistan Region until the end of 2021, the Netherlands government announced in a statement on Friday. 

As a member of the global coalition against the Islamic State (ISIS), the Dutch military has been training Iraqi and Peshmerga soldiers. The two-year extension of the mission will focus “training Iraqi military aimed at the long term stability of Iraq,” tweeted Geoffrey van Leeuwen, director of Middle East affairs at the Netherlands foreign ministry.

About 60 Dutch soldiers will provide the training, in addition to commitments to the NATO mission in Iraq. 

The coalition was established in 2014 after ISIS militants seized vast swathes of northern Iraq, including Iraq’s second city of Mosul, and threatened to march on Baghdad and Erbil. The military alliance also partnered with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in Syria. 

ISIS was declared defeated in Iraq in December 2017 and in Syria in March 2019. However, remnants of the group have returned to earlier insurgency tactics and continue to carry out low-scale attacks, particularly near Mosul, in the disputed Iraqi-Kurdish territories, and in Syria’s Deir ez-Zor and Raqqa provinces.