12 gorgeous photos of the US Marine Corps in action during 2016

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2016 was a busy year for the US Marine Corps.

The service kept pretty active in training and in combat: Marine pilots have been, and continue to hammer ISIS fighters in Iraq and Syria, while Marine advisers operate on the ground in Iraq.

Meanwhile, the Corps started rotating troops to Australia and carried out other large training exercises around the world.

Of course, there was much more that happened, and usually, a Marine Corps combat photographer was on hand to document the action. We went through the Corps' Flickr photos and picked out our favorites for the past year.

Here's what caught our eye.

The Corps' official photographers had quite a year last year, snapping some noteworthy shots all over the world from the shores of New York ...

... to the mountaintops of Australia, where Marines started deploying to back in April.

There's plenty of action to choose from among the thousands of photographs ...