Three soldiers from Georgia killed in attack in Jordan
MACON, Georgia (41NBC/WMGT)- Three Army Reserve soldiers from Georgia were killed Sunday in Jordan. According to the U.S. Department of Defense, they were supporting Operation Inherent Resolve. The three soldiers have been identified as 46-year-old Sgt. William Jerome Rivers of Carrollton; 24-year-old Spc. Kennedy Ladon Sanders of Waycross; and 23-year-old Spc. Breonna Alexsondria Moffett of Savannah.
The Pentagon said in a statement that a one-way unmanned aerial system (drone) impacted their container housing units. Rivers, Sanders, and Moffett were assigned to the 718th Engineer Company, 926th Engineer Battalion, 926th Engineer Brigade, at Fort Moore (previously Fort Benning) in Columbus.
Georgia father IDs Army reservist daughter, 24, as among 3 US troops killed in Mideast attack
By RUSS BYNUM Associated Press
SAVANNAH, Ga. (AP) — During their last phone conversation, Spc. Kennedy Sanders told her mother that she wanted to take her military career to a new level when she returned home to Georgia from the Middle East. She also revealed, to her mother’s strict disapproval, that she was thinking of buying a motorcycle.
The 24-year-old Army reservist and her family were already looking ahead to summer when Sanders was scheduled to return to Waycross, the hometown where she helped coach soccer and basketball and worked at a pharmacy while taking college courses with the aim of becoming an X-ray technician.
Plans to celebrate the young citizen-soldier’s homecoming in June were shattered Sunday when military officers came to her parents’ house to deliver the worst possible news: Sanders was among three U.S. service members killed by a weekend drone strike on their base in Jordan near the Syrian border.
Her parents said Monday that Sanders had volunteered to deploy, eager for a chance to see a different part of the world.
“She was loved. She didn’t have any enemies. All the time you saw her smiling,” Sanders’ father, Shawn Sanders, said in an interview Monday. “This is somebody who was just living life, enjoying life at a young age, working toward a career.”
An outpouring of grief and support spread swiftly in Waycross and surrounding Ware County, home to 36,000 people in southeast Georgia about 100 miles (160 kilometers) southwest of Savannah.
City Hall ordered flags to be lowered to half-staff on Monday. The family’s congressman and state lawmakers called to offer condolences. A local judge posted a photo on social media of the young woman when she had volunteered for his campaign.
The Pentagon on Monday had not yet released the names of the three U.S. military members who died. The Associated Press is identifying Kennedy Sanders after confirming with her family that she was among those killed.
Sanders and her twin brother were the middle children of five siblings born and raised in the community. Her father served in the Marine Corps and her mother, Oneida Oliver-Sanders, had been a member of the county school board.
Sanders joined the Army Reserve five years ago and served as an engineer assigned to a unit based in rural Tifton, Georgia, her father said. She loved to travel, her parents said, and saw the military as a way to see the world. She had previously deployed to Djibouti before volunteering to go to Kuwait, a trip that included a few months in Jordan where the U.S. operates a logistics support base along the Syrian border.
In her spare time while deployed, Sanders would practice jiu-jitsu and run to keep in shape. She relaxed by knitting and coloring in coloring books. She called home almost daily, her parents said. And while she occasionally mentioned drones being shot down at the base, there was no sense of imminent danger.
“She was speaking with her mom the day before,” Shawn Sanders said. “It wasn’t like they were at high alert or in a secure bunker.”
Though some family members had seen the news on TV of the deadly attack in Jordan, Sanders’ parents said they weren’t aware anything was wrong until uniformed military officers came to their door Sunday. Shawn Sanders said he waited 20 minutes with the visitors so he and his wife could be told together when she got home from work. But he suspected immediately his daughter was dead.
“I knew, being a former member of the armed services,” he said. “I wanted it to be something different. But I knew then.”
Sanders’ mother said her daughter had talked recently of becoming a full-time Army soldier on active duty once her reservist contract had been fulfilled. She was considering buying a home. And she looked forward to more trips abroad and had been studying Italian in anticipation of someday visiting Italy.
“All of these different things that she had plans for, you know, were just cut short in the blink of an eye,” Oneida Sanders said. “I just feel like somebody like her, that’s so full of life, it’s just unfair that she’ll never get to realize those dreams that she had.”
Shawn Sanders called the attack that took his daughter’s life “a senseless act of violence.”
President Joe Biden has promised that the U.S. will respond. Shawn Sanders said he’s confident Biden will make an appropriate decision. Asked what he thinks would be the correct response, the grieving father declined to say.
“Out of anger for losing a child,” he said, “I just can’t.”
Enemy drone that killed US troops in Jordan was mistaken for a US drone, preliminary report suggests
By LOLITA C. BALDOR. AAMER MADHANI and ZEKE MILLER Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — An enemy drone that killed three American troops and wounded dozens of others in Jordan may have been confused with an American drone returning to the U.S. installation, two U.S. officials said Monday.
As the enemy drone was flying in at a low altitude, a U.S. drone was returning to the small desert installation known as Tower 22 and may have been let pass by mistake, according to a preliminary report cited by the officials, who were not authorized to comment and insisted on anonymity,
As a result, there was no effort to shoot down the enemy drone that hit the outpost early Sunday morning. One of the trailers where troops sleep sustained the brunt of the strike, while surrounding trailers got limited damage from the blast and flying debris.
Officials said that of the 34 wounded troops, most had cuts, bruises, traumatic brain injuries and similar wounds. Eight were medically evacuated and the most seriously hurt service member is in critical but stable condition.
The preliminary conclusion was first reported by The Wall Street Journal. The White House declined to comment on the finding.
Explanation for how the enemy drone evaded U.S. air defenses on the installation came as the White House said Monday it’s not looking for war with Iran even as President Joe Biden vows retaliatory action. The Democratic administration believes Tehran was behind the strike.
Biden met with members of his national security team in the White House Situation Room to discuss the latest developments.
The brazen attack, which the Biden administration blames on Iranian-based proxies, adds another layer of complexity to an already tense Mideast situation as the Biden administration tries to keep the Israel-Hamas war from expanding into a broader regional conflict.
“The president and I will not tolerate attacks on U.S. forces, and we will take all necessary actions to defend the U.S. and our troops,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Monday as he met at the Pentagon with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.
Biden faces a difficult balancing act as he looks to strike back against Tehran in a forceful way without allowing the Gaza conflict to further metastasize. The drone attack was one of dozens on U.S. troops in the Middle East since Hamas launched attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, igniting the war in Gaza. But it’s the first in which American service members have been killed.
National Security Council spokesman John Kirby reiterated a day after Biden promised to “hold all those responsible to account at a time and in a manner (of) our choosing” that the U.S. administration wasn’t seeking to get into another conflict in the Middle East.
But Kirby also made clear that the American patience has worn thin after more than two months of attacks by Iranian proxies on U.S. troops in Iraq, Syria and Jordan and on the U.S. Navy and commercial vessels in the Red Sea. The groups — including Yemen’s Houthi rebels and Iraq based Kataeb Hezbollah — say the attacks are in response to Israel’s ongoing to military operations in Gaza.
“We are not looking for a war with Iran. We are not looking to escalate the tensions any more than they already have been escalating,” Kirby told reporters. “That said, this was a very serious attack. It had lethal consequences. We will respond, and we respond appropriately.”
Iran on Monday denied it was behind the Jordan strike.
“These claims are made with specific political goals to reverse the realities of the region,” Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency quoted foreign ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani as saying. Iran regularly denies involvement in attacks linked back to it through the militias it arms across the wider Mideast.
Kirby said that U.S. officials are still working through determining which militant group was behind the attack. He noted that Iran has longed equipped and trained the militias.
Republicans have laid blame on Biden for doing too little to deter Iranian militias, which have carried out at least 150 attacks on U.S. troops in region since the start of the war.
Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump on Sunday called the attack “yet another horrific and tragic consequence of Joe Biden’s weakness and surrender.”
The attack hit a U.S. military desert outpost in the far reaches of northeastern Jordan known as Tower 22. The installation sits near the demilitarized zone on the border between Jordan and Syria along a sandy, bulldozed berm marking the DMZ’s southern edge. The Iraqi border is only 10 kilometers (6 miles) away.
The base began as a Jordanian outpost watching the border, then saw an increased U.S. presence after American forces entered Syria in late 2015. The small installation includes U.S. engineering, aviation, logistics and security troops, with about 350 U.S. Army and Air Force personnel deployed.
Iraq’s government condemned the drone strike in an apparent effort to distance itself from an attack likely carried out by the Iranian-backed militias that have a strong presence inside Iraq.
Government spokesman Bassem al-Awadi said in a statement on Monday that Iraq is “monitoring with a great concern the alarming security developments in the region” and called for “an end to the cycle of violence.” The statement said that Iraq is ready to participate in diplomatic efforts to prevent further escalation.
An umbrella group for Iran-backed factions known as the Islamic Resistance in Iraq has claimed dozens of attacks against bases housing U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria since the Israel-Hamas war began. On Sunday, the group claimed three drone attacks against sites in Syria, including near the border with Jordan, and one inside of “occupied Palestine” but so far hasn’t claimed the attack in Jordan.
John Bolton, who served as national security adviser to Trump, said Iran hasn’t paid a price for the havoc that its proxies have unleashed in the region. He suggested the Biden administration could send a strong message to Tehran with strikes on Iranian vessels in the Red Sea, Iranian air defenses along the Iraqi border, and bases that have been used to train and supply militant groups for years
“So until Iran bears a cost, you’re not going to reestablish deterrence, you’re not going to put the belligerence on a downward slope.”
The attack came as U.S. officials were seeing signs of progress in negotiations to broker a deal between Israel and Hamas to release the more than 100 remaining hostages being held in Gaza in exchange for an extended pause in fighting. While contours of a deal under consideration would not end the war, Americans believed that it could lay the groundwork for a durable resolution to the conflict.
Top U.S., Israeli, Egypt and Qatari officials held talks on Sunday in France about an emerging framework for a hostage deal. Israel said “significant gaps” remain but called the talks constructive and said they would continue in the week ahead.
The Jordan attack also had U.S. allies on edge that the situation in the Middle East could further spiral.
German Foreign Ministry spokesperson Sebastian Fischer said that “in view of the extremely tense situation in the region, this act is completely irresponsible and could lead to pushing the region further toward escalation.”
“We expect from Iran that it finally exert its influence on its allies in the region so that there is no uncontrolled conflagration, in which no one can have an interest,” Fischer said.