The real number of American troops deployed to Iraq and Syria exceeds the Pentagon’s official figures by thousands, according to the US government’s own data.
While the Pentagon insists that it has only sent 503 troops to Syria, a quarterly report by the Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC) puts the number at around 1,720, more than three times higher.
The DMDC is the US Defense Department’s personnel agency and collects data on American troops are serving in individual states and overseas countries.
The same report, issued in September, showed that there were 8,992 American troops in Iraq, almost 3,500 more than the Pentagon’s official tally of 5,262.
Colonel Rob Manning, a Pentagon spokesman, questioned the credibility of DMDC’s numbers, downplaying them as initial estimates for given locations that also factored in short-term deployments and troop rotations in other countries.
“The DMDC numbers are not the official deployment…