US acknowledges presence of 11,000 troops in Afghanistan

The United States has acknowledged that it has about 11-thousand troops in Afghanistan. The figure is thousands more than previously stated.
The Pentagon says the announcement is a step toward increasing transparency, but it did not confirm how many U-S troops are in Iraq and Syria. The U-S Department of Defense had previously said there were roughly eight-thousand-four-hundred troops in Afghanistan. The official number of U-S troops in Iraq and Syria respectively stands at about 5-thousand and five-hundred. But American officials believe that the actual number is thousands more than that. U-S Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis has said he will wait for a complete count of American troops in Afghanistan before making a decision on how many additional troops to send.