04 May 2016•Update: 04 May 2016
WASHINGTON
The Pentagon on Wednesday described the Daesh attack that killed a U.S. Navy SEAL in northern Iraq as a “big fight” despite a relatively small number of terrorists involved.
Navy SEAL Charles Keating IV was part of a Quick Reaction Force that was expedited to evacuate American advisers who went to Tal Asqaf village, a few kilometers behind the front lines, for a tactical meeting with a Peshmerga unit, U.S.-led coalition spokesman Col. Steve Warren told reporters via a video conference from Baghdad.
According to Warren, 125 Daesh militants breached into Peshmerga fronts using truck bombs to blow up checkpoints.
“It was a bad day for us here yesterday,” Warren said. “It was a big fight, one of the largest we've seen recently.”
The spokesman said the Navy SEAL was struck by a direct fire from Daesh militants at around 9.30 a.m. local time (GMT 6.30 a.m.) Tuesday, approximately two-and-a-half hours after the battle began.
“Although he was medevaced within the all-important golden hour, his wound was not survivable,” Warren said, adding that no other coalition or American forces were injured.
The two medevac helicopters that were deployed to the scene were also damaged by small arms fire, he added.
Warren told reporters that the battle continued up to 24 hours but the U.S. forces left the battlefield after a couple of hours.
According to the spokesman, coalition air forces responded with 31 airstrikes conducted by 11 manned aircraft and two drones.
Besides an intensive air campaign, nearly a dozen American commandos and several hundreds of Kurdish Peshmerga troops fought Daesh militants, according to Warren.
“Air power destroyed 20 enemy vehicles, two truck bombs, three mortar systems, one bulldozer, 58 ISIL [Daesh] terrorists were killed,” he said. “The Peshmerga have regained control of Tal Asqaf.”
Three American soldiers have been killed in Iraq since the U.S. withdrew from the country in 2011.
One of the soldiers was killed in March during a rocket fire in Makhmour. Another was killed in October 2015 during an operation on a Daesh prison in northern Iraq where U.S. Special Forces accompanied Peshmerga to rescue 70 Iraqi hostages.
