Vice President Mike Pence on Saturday made an unannounced trip to Iraq. Pence and his wife, Karen, were accompanied by a small group of the vice president’s associates and about a dozen journalists, according to a pool report. The group departed Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on Friday for the 15-hour journey to Al Asad Air Base in western Iraq. The couple visited with U.S. troops ahead of next week’s Thanksgiving holiday and had lunch with about 150 troops. President Trump and first lady Melania Trump visited U.S. troops at the base on the day after Christmas last year.
Pence also received a classified briefing at the air base, from which U.S. forces launched the operation that killed Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi in Syria last month, and then spoke by phone with Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi. The trip was also meant to reassure the United States’ Kurdish allies in the region after Trump ordered the withdrawal of American troops. The vice president traveled to Erbil to meet with Iraqi Kurdistan President Nechirvan Barzani.
