,
The Pentagon will call up 12,000 National Guard soldiers for service in Iraq to fill gaps in the overworked army, a news report said Thursday.
The National Guard is a volunteer militia, but, said NBC News, they will receive an involuntary call-up to report for duty in Iraq.
The Pentagon told AFP it had no immediate comment on the report.
Guard units are based in each US state. Four states will provide the troops from four brigades, the television network said, citing unnamed Defense Department sources.
The call-up follows closely President George W. Bush's controversial “surge” of 21,000 troops, meant to quell the sectarian violence among Iraqis as well as Al-Qaeda fighters determined to sow chaos.
However, US troops are being rotated in and out of Iraq, sometimes without the customary training, sometimes without the customary 12 months' rest at US bases.
Pentagon sources told NBC that the orders for the deployment awaited Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s approval.
Democrats, who control both houses of Congress, have been trying to hem in Bush, by conditioning continued war funding on setting a timeline for drawing down troop levels in Iraq.
The Pentagon said Thursday that some 145,000 US troops are serving in Iraq.
Some 3,250 US troops have also died in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion, according to an AFP count based on Pentagon figures.
A US Defense Department spokesman said Monday that some 30,000 additional US troops sent as reinforcements to Iraq will remain in the war-torn country until at least the end of August.
The Pentagon would deploy 7,000 troops to replace units on their way out of Iraq, a move that will allow the reinforcements to remain in the country until at least late August, spokesman Bryan Whitman said.
