U.S. Sends Troops To Iraq to Assist In Evacuation of Religious Minorities

U.S. troops landed on a mountain in northern Iraq on Wednesday to possibly oversee the evacuation of thousands of religious minorities who are currently seeking refuge on the mountaintop after they were displaced by the Islamic State.

A U.S. military official who remained unnamed told Reuters that the U.S. soldiers traveled to Mount Sinjar at night on Tuesday, arriving at the area in the early hours of Wednesday morning to do an assessment of the situation.

"They were there last night and they did an assessment," the official said. 

The military personnel that arrived in Sinjar only numbered to twenty, and stayed a short time to conduct the assessment of the thousands of displaced people seeking shelter on the mountain.

The U.S. is currently debating ways to free the thousands of refugees from Mount Sinjar, who are reportedly suffering from thirst and hunger as they wait atop the mountain. The refugees, many of them members of the Yazidi religious sect, were forced from their homes after Islamic State militants invaded their villages, demanding they convert to Islam, pay a tax, or die.

While speaking at a military base in Camp Pendleton, California, U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said that although the U.S. is sending troops into Iraq, the military's purpose there will be to aid in the current humanitarian crisis, not to engage in combat.

"This is not a combat boots on the ground kind of operation," Hagel said. "We're not going back into Iraq in any of the same combat mission dimensions that we once were in in Iraq."