Fox News reports this morning:
A U.S. service member has been killed in northern Iraq, defense secretary Ash Carter said Tuesday.
Carter gave no details about the service member who was killed, but said the death occurred “in the neighborhood” of the city of Irbil, in Iraqi Kurdistan.
“It is a combat death, of course. And a very sad loss,” Carter told reporters in Stuttgart, Germany, where he was attending a ceremony installing a new commander of U.S. European Command.
A statement by the U.S.-led coalition confirmed that the service member was killed by enemy fire. A defense official told Fox News the American was an adviser to Kurdish Peshmerga troops. He was killed by “direct fire” after ISIS forces penetrated the Peshmerga’s forward line. The American was three to two to three miles behind that front line, the official said.
Three U.S. military personnel have been killed in Iraq as part of the ground fight against the ISIS terror group. The last American death happened in March, when a U.S. Marine was killed in a rocket attack on a firebase in northern Iraq.
This past October, an Army Special Operator was killed during a rescue mission that freed as many as 70 ISIS hostages.
The latest death came following the deployment of a 200-person special operations task force to Irbil, which Carter first announced in December. Last week, President Obama approved the deployment of 450 additional US troops to Iraq and Syria….