(Source : globalsecurity.org / ROC Central News Agency / CNN) – Tsai confirms U.S. troop presence, expresses faith in Biden defense vow
President Tsai Ing-wen confirmed for the first time the presence of U.S. military personnel in Taiwan, during an interview with CNN released Thursday.
Tsai said Taiwan had “a wide range of cooperation with the U.S. aiming at increasing our defense capability.” (…)
International media reported earlier this month that the U.S. had been rotating a small number of U.S. Marines and Special Operations Forces soldiers on the island to train with the Taiwanese military, amid rising tensions across the Taiwan Strait.
Tsai, however, declined to specify how many American service members have been sent to Taiwan, saying the number was “not as many as people thought.”
At a legislative meeting Thursday morning, however, Taiwan’s Defense Minister Chiu Kuo-cheng denied that U.S. troops had been deployed to Taiwan.
Chiu instead described the presence of U.S. military personnel in Taiwan as military training “exchanges” with their Taiwanese counterparts.
Since Tsai took office in 2016, Beijing has ramped up economic, diplomatic and military pressure on Taiwan. Since 2019, it has frequently sent Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) aircraft sorties into Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ).
This year alone, 680 PLA aircraft entered Taiwan’s ADIZ, including a record number 149 sorties in just four days at the start of October, according to data from Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense. (…)
Read Full Article >>> www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/news/taiwan/2021/taiwan
Illustration © From the CNN video >>> https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2021/10/27/china-taiwan-president-intv-us-troop-presence-ripley-vpx.cnn/video/playlists/around-the-world/
*** About Taiwan’s ADIZ, see also >>> https://graphics.reuters.com/TAIWAN-CHINA/byvrjrmgnve/
