An American soldier has been killed in combat operations in northern Iraq, becoming the third US military casualty since President Obama resumed operations in the country in 2014.
The soldier, who has not been named, died this morning close to a frontline near Arbil, the capital of the semi-autonomous Kurdish region in the north. Announcing the news in Stuttgart Ash Carter, the US defence secretary, described it as “a combat death … in the neighbourhood of Arbil”.
US central command, the body in charge of military operations against Islamic State in the Middle East, said in a statement that “a coalition service member was killed in northern Iraq as a result of enemy fire”.
Sources in northern Iraq said that the soldier was killed near the Assyrian Christian town of Tal Isquf, northwest of Mosul. The town was seized by Isis in 2014, prompting all of its residents to flee bar a few who were too elderly to leave their homes. It was then recaptured by a Christian militia under the command of Kurdish forces, and had been fully controlled by them for more than a year.
Isis launched a surprise attack on Tal Isquf in the early hours of Tuesday morning, using car and suicide bombers to briefly overrun the town before being pushed back by US airstrikes and a Kurdish counter offensive. The attack is the most serious breach of Kurdish defences in recent months.
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The soldier’s death has retrained the spotlight on the numbers and remit of US forces in Iraq. Mr Obama made disengagement from the calamitous war a central pillar of his campaign strategy in 2008, and pulled the last US troops out in 2011.
Three years later they were forced to return, however, as Isis tore a swathe of terror through the country. Since then the US military presence has quietly ballooned from just 275 advisers to more than 4,000 active servicemen, including Marines and special forces – despite Mr Obama’s repeated insistence that he would not be putting boots on the ground in Iraq.
A US Marine was killed in an Isis rocket attack on a frontline base south of Arbil in March, while a member of the Delta Force died during a raid on an Isis prison near the central city of Kirkuk last October.