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By Diana Elias
Associated Press

MOHAMMED Al AHMED NAVAL BASE, Kuwait — Hover crafts on Sunday began ferrying hundreds of Marines from their ships anchored in Kuwaiti waters to this base for training ahead of possible deployment in neighboring Iraq.

Most of the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit will be training in the Kuwaiti desert for “a number of weeks,” said Col. Tom Qualls, the unit’s commanding officer. After training, “our future is not quite revealable at this point,” he added.

The “flexible” fighting force of 2,175 Marines and sailors has the ability to carry out humanitarian assistance, embassy evacuations, shore-based and maritime security operations, and combat operations in Iraq, Qualls said. He said the majority of the force would be landing in Kuwait but did not give a number.

“In terms of the future for us, we could be doing any one of those items, and perhaps every one of them,” he told reporters over the near-deafening hum of jet-engined crafts carrying the Marines and their weapons — including tanks, trucks, Humvees and artillery guns — ashore.

It took the three vessels — amphibious assault ship Kearsarge, dock landing ship Ashland and amphibious transport dock Ponce — a month and a half to reach the Kuwait waters from Camp Lejeune, N.C., Qualls said.

The landing will be completed “in the course of the next three days,” according to the commander.

Their landing will raise to some 15,000 the number of U.S. military personnel in Kuwait, the small oil-rich state that has been a major ally of Washington in the Gulf since the U.S.-led international coalition liberated it in the 1991 Gulf War from a seven-month Iraqi occupation. The figure fluctuates as troops are deployed to Iraq.

Kuwait was the launch pad for the war that toppled Saddam Hussein in April 2003, and it continues to be a logistics base for the multinational forces serving there.

“We couldn’t do this without Kuwait,” Qualls told reporters, describing the country as an “incredibly important” foothold and springboard.

Marines stretched out on the ground in the shade of a line of trees at the naval base before being transported to their desert camp. Up to 60 percent of the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit are veterans of the Iraq invasion and Washington’s war on terror in Afghanistan following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.

Staff Sgt. William Sudbrock, 32, of Vero Beach, Fla., said he had been training hard for the last 10 months and was not concerned about the worsening security situation in Iraq, where insurgents have been carrying out attacks against multinational forces and civilians in an effort to derail the war-ravaged country’s reconstruction.

“Well trained, well outfitted, prepared for combat,” he confidently said.