“Many of you have asked today about the status of legal protections for the small number of military advisors that will be working inside Iraq,” John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, said on Tuesday.

“I can confirm for you that Iraq has provided acceptable assurances on the issue of protections for these personnel via the exchange of diplomatic note. Specifically, Iraq has committed itself to providing protections for our personnel equivalent to those provided to personnel who were in country before the crisis.”

“We believe these protections are adequate to the short-term assessment and advisory mission our troops will be performing in Iraq. With this agreement, we will be able to start establishing the first few assessment teams."

The agreement, which came via “diplomatic note,” will see US advisors subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and not Iraqi law.

None of the Special Forces troops have arrived in Baghdad yet, with Pentagon officials saying they would touch ground by the end of the week.

The Pentagon hopes US trainers will be able to provide a better intelligence assessment of radicals from the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), including the type and quantity of US-made armaments which they had seized from the Iraqi military.

Defense officials have stressed, however, that there are no plans for them to directly engage in combat.

On June 10, the ISIL militants took control of Mosul, the capital of Nineveh Province. They later took control of the city of Tikrit, located about 140 kilometers (87 miles) northwest of Baghdad.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has said that the country’s security forces would confront the terrorists, calling the seizure of Mosul a “conspiracy.”

he Iraqi prime minister has also blamed Saudi Arabia and Qatar for the security crisis and growing terrorism in his country, denouncing Riyadh as a major supporter of global terrorism.

SHI/SHI