WASHINGTON — Petty Officer 1st Class Charles Keating IV died Tuesday in an Iraq village as he helped rescue fellow U.S. servicemembers under attack from Islamic State fighters, the Pentagon said Wednesday.
Navy SEAL killed in Iraq was part of force sent to rescue advisers (Video)
http://www.stripes.com/news/us/navy-seal-killed-in-iraq-was-part-of-force-sent-to-rescue-advisers-1.407847
“He is an American hero,” Col. Steve Warren said of Keating, the third U.S. combat death in Iraq since U.S. forces returned there in 2014 to help Iraq fight the Islamic State group.
The 31-year-old Navy SEAL was part of a quick reaction force called to help U.S. advisers beat back the early-morning surprise attack by the terrorist group, said Warren, the Baghdad-based spokesman for Operation Inherent Resolve.
It “was a big fight, one of the largest we’ve seen recently,” Warren said Wednesday as he described the battle to reporters. “There were bullets everywhere.”
It started about 7:30 a.m.
About 12 U.S. advisers arrived in the village of Teleskof on Tuesday for a meeting with peshmerga fighters to help them with training and equipment, Warren said.
Unknown to the advisers, and undetected by U.S. surveillance, the Islamic State group had assembled about 125 fighters and 20 vehicles to the south and were about to breach the peshmerga defenses — a series of guarded outposts and checkpoints, he said.
“The enemy was able to very covertly assemble enough force, which included several truck bombs, some bulldozers and, of course, their infantry,” Warren said. “They were able to punch through the Kurdish line there … and really sprint towards Teleskof, which was their objective.”
The Pentagon has repeatedly lauded its visibility and control of the battlespace in Iraq over the last several months, noting increased airstrikes and gains by Iraqi forces have made it nearly impossible for Islamic State fighters to move in large groups. On Wednesday, Warren said, this time, the forces were able to mass undetected, possibly by assembling in smaller groups in nearby areas.
At about 7:50 a.m., the Islamic State fighters reached the U.S. advisers and an intense battle ensued, he said. The advisers, typically culled from Army special forces units, fought back.
But they “could not get away,” Warren said. Keating’s quick reaction force was called to help.
U.S. airpower responded too. The air assault included A-10 ground attack aircraft, F-16 and F-15 fighter jets and the B-52 heavy bomber. Eleven aircraft launched 31 strikes against Islamic State militants as they fought with the U.S. and peshmerga forces. U.S. aircraft destroyed two additional Islamic State truck bombs. About half of the 125 Islamic State fighters in the battle Tuesday were killed.
At about 9:25 a.m., the Islamic State fighters detonated a truck bomb near the U.S. position. Minutes later, Keating was hit by gunfire.
Black Hawk medevac helicopters responded and transported Keating at about 10:19 a.m. The helicopters, damaged by gunfire, were still able to get Keating to a U.S. military field hospital in Irbil, Warren said. But Keating did not make it.
“His wound was not survivable,” Warren said.
Keating was lauded and mourned Tuesday in his home state of Arizona where Gov. Doug Ducey ordered the flags lowered to half-staff until he is brought home and buried.
ISIS forces attacked and overran the northern Iraqi town of Tel Asqof, near the major ISIS city of Mosul, with a number of suicide vehicle bombers forcing their way in through Kurdish forces, and fighting heavily. Among the slain in what officials are confirming is “direct combat” was a US Navy SEAL, Charles Keating IV.
As Obama Promised No Boots On The Ground In Iraq, US Navy Seal Killed In ISIS Attack
http://novorossia.today/116913-2/
This is the third US soldier killed in fighting on the ground in Iraq since the latest war began in 2014, despite repeated assurances from the Obama Administration that there would be “no boots on the ground” in Iraq whatsoever.
Despite those repeated pledges, some 5,000 US troops are presently in Iraq, and a growing number of them are on the front lines. They may not officially be labeled “combat troops,” but the reality of their situation is unmistakable, and Pentagon officials have repeatedly confirmed that many are in fact routinely engaging in combat.
In addition to the SEAL, Kurdish officials claim at least 10 of their Peshmerga fighters were killed, along with an estimated 80 ISIS fighters. The town was taken for much of the morning, but Kurdish officials say they’ve since recovered much of it. As always, such gains last only until the other side decides to send enough troops to overrun it again.
An Army captain sued President Barack Obama on Wednesday, alleging that he doesn't have the proper congressional authority to wage war against Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria.
Army captain sues Obama; says he lacks authority to fight Islamic State
http://www.stripes.com/news/us/army-captain-sues-obama-says-he-lacks-authority-to-fight-islamic-state-1.407879
Capt. Nathan Michael Smith filed the suit in U.S. District Court in Washington as the president is deploying more special operations forces to the region - and a day after a Navy SEAL was killed in combat in Iraq, the third since a U.S.-led coalition launched its campaign against the Islamic State in the summer of 2014.
Smith supports the war on military and moral grounds and considers the Islamic State an "army of butchers."
." But he wants the court to tell Obama that he needs to ask Congress for a new Authorization for the Use of Military Force.
The White House did not comment on the lawsuit.
To fight IS, Obama has been relying on congressional authorizations given to President George W. Bush for the war on al-Qaida and the invasion of Iraq. Critics say the White House's use of post-9/11 congressional authorizations is a legal stretch at best.
The White House has claimed it has all the authority it needs to wage the war against IS, but says if an authorization tailored specifically for IS passed Congress with bipartisan support, it would send a clear signal of unity to U.S. troops and those groups they are fighting.
Several lawmakers have pushed for a new authorization and the White House sent its own version to Capitol Hill.
But many lawmakers have no interest in casting a war vote, leaving the issue languishing in Congress.
Smith is asking the court to find that the war against IS violates the War Powers Resolution because Congress has not declared war or given the president specific authorization to fight it.
This lawlessness has made it impossible for Capt. Smith to determine whether his present mission is inconsistent with his oath to 'preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,' thus requiring him to seek an independent determination of this matter from the court," the suit said.
Members of the military are obligated to refuse to follow an order that is illegal under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. If they follow unlawful ones, they risk punishment.
Ramadi, the provincial capital of Iraq’s Sunni heartland, was declared “fully liberated” early this year. But the cost of victory may have been the city itself, with widespread destruction from strikes, artillery and the militants' scorched earth tactic of destroying buildings and infrastructure as they fled.
Iraq routed IS from Ramadi at a high cost: A city destroyed
http://www.mail.com/news/politics/4322386-iraq-routed-ramadi-high-cost-city-destroyed.html#.7518-stage-hero1-2
May 05, 2016 - A building that housed a pool hall and ice cream shops — reduced to rubble. A row of money changers and motorcycle repair garages — obliterated, a giant bomb crater in its place. The square's Haji Ziad Restaurant, beloved for years by Ramadi residents for its grilled meats — flattened. The restaurant was so popular its owner built a larger, fancier branch across the street three years ago. That, too, is now a pile of concrete and twisted iron rods.
The destruction extends to nearly every part of Ramadi, once home to 1 million people and now virtually empty. A giant highway cloverleaf at the main entrance to the city is partially toppled. Apartment block after apartment block has been crushed. Along a residential street, the walls of homes have been shredded away, exposing furniture and bedding. Graffiti on the few homes still standing warn of explosives inside.
When Iraqi government forces backed by U.S.-led warplanes wrested this city from Islamic State militants after eight months of IS control, it was heralded as a major victory. But the cost of winning Ramadi has been the city itself.
The scope of the damage is beyond any of the other Iraqi cities recaptured so far from the jihadi group. Photographs provided to The Associated Press by satellite imagery and analytics company DigitalGlobe show more than 3,000 buildings and nearly 400 roads and bridges were damaged or destroyed between May 2015, when Ramadi fell to IS, and Jan. 22, after most of the fighting had ended. Over roughly the same period, nearly 800 civilians were killed in clashes, airstrikes and executions.
Now the few signs of life are the soldiers manning checkpoints, newly painted and decorated with brightly colored plastic flowers. Vehicles pick their way around craters blocking roads as the dust from thousands of crushed buildings drifts over the landscape. Along one street, the only sign that houses ever existed there is a line of garden gates and clusters of fruit trees.
The wreckage was caused by IS-laid explosives and hundreds of airstrikes by the Iraqi military and the U.S.-led coalition. Besides the fighting itself, the Islamic State group is increasingly using a scorched earth strategy as it loses ground in Iraq. When IS fighters withdraw, they leave an empty prize, blowing up buildings and wiring thousands of others with explosives. The bombs are so costly and time-consuming to defuse that much of recently liberated Iraq is now unlivable.
"All they leave is rubble," said Maj. Mohammed Hussein, whose counterterrorism battalion was one of the first to move into Ramadi. "You can't do anything with rubble." As a result, U.S.-led coalition and Iraqi officials are rethinking their tactics as they battle IS to regain territory. The coalition is scaling back its airstrikes in besieged urban areas. Efforts are underway to increase training of explosive disposal teams.
The new approach is particularly key as Iraq and the coalition build up to the daunting task of retaking Mosul, Iraq's second-biggest city, held by IS for nearly two years. "They know they can't just turn Mosul into a parking lot," said a Western diplomat in Baghdad who has been present for a number of meetings with coalition and Iraqi defense officials regarding the Mosul operation. The diplomat commented on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press.
In January, after IS was pushed out of Ramadi, thousands of families returned to their homes. But residents have since been barred from coming back because dozens of civilians died from IS booby traps. Officials estimate IS planted thousands of IEDs, improvised explosive devices, across the city. Janus Global Operations, an American firm, began working to remove them last month and said it has so far cleared more than 1,000 square meters — a fraction of a city block.
The vast majority of the city's population remains displaced. Ramadi lies on the Euphrates River west of Baghdad and is the capital of Iraq's Sunni heartland, Anbar province. Even as IS swept over most of the province and northern Iraq in 2014, Ramadi had held out under tenuous government control. After months of fighting, in May 2015, Islamic State fighters captured it by unleashing a barrage of truck and suicide bombs that overwhelmed government forces.
They raised their flag above Anbar Operations Command center, the former provincial police and military headquarters that was once a U.S. military base, then proceeded to largely level the complex with explosives. Over the following days, they methodically destroyed government buildings.
Militants took over homes, converting living rooms into command centers and bedrooms into barracks. They dug tunnels under the streets to evade air strikes, shut down schools, looted and destroyed the homes of people associated with the local government. They set up a headquarters in the campus of Anbar University, on the city's western edge.
Over the course of the eight-month campaign to push IS out of Ramadi, coalition aircraft dropped more than 600 bombs on the city. The strikes targeted IS fighters, but also destroyed bridges, buildings and roads, the Pentagon has acknowledged. Government forces seized districts on the outskirts and in December launched their final assault.
As Iraqi ground forces moved into Ramadi, IS methodically laid explosives and blew up swaths of the city's infrastructure. The electrical grid was almost completely destroyed and the city's water network was also heavily damaged. The jihadis bombed the city's remaining bridges and two dams. Though most of the population had already left, IS fighters tightened checkpoints along main roads out of the city to prevent civilians from fleeing. They later used families as human shields as they made their escape.
"ISIS made a concerted effort to ensure the city would be unlivable," said Patrick Martin, an Iraq researcher at the Institute for the Study of War. As his convoy of troops approached Ramadi, Maj. Hussein said he watched IS fighters set fires in Anbar University to destroy sensitive documents. The fires burned for days.
The complex is now largely destroyed. A gymnasium used by IS to store documents has been torched. Charred sports equipment — a boxing glove, cleats, pieces of a track suit — line the hallways. Iraqi artillery fire punched thick holes into the university's library. Only the two main reading rooms are safe to visit; the rest of the four-story building is believed to be booby-trapped.
Trying to uproot dug-in fighters, coalition aircraft and Iraqi artillery unleashed devastation. Haji Ziad Square, for example, is a strategic intersection with lines of sight down major thoroughfares by which troops had to approach. So IS fighters deployed heavily there. The new multistory Haji Ziad Restaurant made a prime sniper post. Iraqi troops called in intense coalition strikes on the square to help clear the militants.
Similarly, a complex of around 40 large residential towers stood across from Anbar University on a key route for Iraqi forces entering the city. Before-and-after imagery shows at least a dozen of them were levelled. Multiple bomb craters are evident, including at least two that measure more than 45 feet across.
In a district along the western edge of downtown Ramadi, a dense strip of buildings, homes and bustling shops, not a single building escaped unscathed from the IS occupation and the coalition airstrikes. Key streets throughout the city are blocked by craters as each side tried to hamper the other's movement.
Tens of thousands of Ramadi's residents live in camps or with extended family in Baghdad. Hundreds of thousands are in other nearby villages. Thousands more live in a small resort town on Habbaniyah Lake south of Ramadi that has become a sprawling camp.
According to the United Nations' satellite mapping agency, UNITAR, an estimated 5,700 buildings out of the city's total of around 55,000 were seriously damaged or destroyed. With an eye to reducing destruction in the fight against IS moving forward, coalition planes are using fewer airstrikes and smaller, more targeted munitions.
IT'S ONE of the essential tenets of the new age of humanitarian war that war is not as bad as it used to be, or at least that it’s not so bad that the costs outweigh the gains.
Why a million Iraqis killed in the US-UK war on Iraq are not worth mentioning
http://katehon.com/671-why-a-million-iraqis-killed-in-the-us-uk-war-on-iraq-are-not-worth-mentioning.html
War, or western war at least, is no longer the grim rider on the pale horse, bringing chaos, death and random destruction.
High-tech precision weapons, precision targeting enabled by lawyers, new ethical norms, population-centric counterinsurgency – all this has made it possible to vaporize the bad guys only, neatly severing the infrastructural linkages that hold rogue states and dictatorships together, so that the whole business is over before anyone even realizes it.
Once this is accepted then it becomes natural for powerful countries equipped with this weaponry to think of war as a first choice rather than a last resort, and also to convince their populations that war will not only be cost-free for them, but that its effects on the countries on the receiving end of it will also be minimal and ultimately beneficial.
This is what we have been told ever since the US invasion of Panama and the first Gulf War and throughout the last fourteen years of the ‘war on terror,’ whenever the US and its allies are considering who next to bomb.
One of the ways in which these governments have attempted to ensure popular acceptance is by ignoring or downplaying any evidence that contradicts this new mythology of war.
Last month a joint report Body Count: Casualty Figures after 10 Years of the ‘War on Terror’ produced by the medical-political peace organization Physicians for Social Responsibility, Physicians for Global Survival, and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War
concluded that 1.3 million people have died as a direct or indirect of wars fought in three main theatres of war in Iraq (1 million), Afghanistan (220,000) and Pakistan (80,000). These figures do not include the death toll in other countries where western military operations have taken place in Yemen, Somalia and Libya. They are nevertheless way higher than any calculations made by the US or any of its allies, or the much lower figures from ‘passive’ reporting of casualties based solely on reported combat deaths in the media of the type that Iraq Body Count (IBC) has specialized in.
The report also claims that 1.3 million is a ‘conservative estimate’ and that the real figure globally may be as high as 2 million. These statistics not only include victims of violence perpetrated by the different state and non-state protagonists involved in these conflicts; they also consider those who have died as a result of the indirect consequences of these wars, such as hunger or malnutrition, lack of clean water, medicine and access to hospitals, a deterioration in living conditions, diseases caused or intensified by the destruction of infrastructure, and weaponry containing toxic materials.
I am not an epidemiologist or a statistician, so I am not in a position to pass a verdict on the quality of the methodology involved in this research, but if respected and internationally-recognized medical organizations and professionals reach conclusions like this, then I am certainly going to take them seriously unless I have a very good reason not to do so.
One might also expect, in democratic societies, that governments, political parties and journalists would also want to consider and evaluate these findings too, because if they are accurate then they call the whole notion of a ‘humanitarian’ war against ‘terror’ into question. They might also be a starting point for a wider debate about the justifications and rationalizations for the great swathe of global violence unleashed in response to the 9/11 attacks.
Yet the response to the Body Count report has been almost total silence. No US or British government official has commented on the report or referred to it. The mainstream media has not mentioned it either. The report has only been picked up by the usual suspects (RT, Telesur, Press tv), and various leftist or antiwar Internet sources. This silence is not entirely surprising.
As the report notes:
‘A politically useful option for U.S. political elites has been to attribute the on-going violence to internecine conflicts of various types, including historical religious animosities, as if the resurgence and brutality of such conflicts is unrelated to the destabilization caused by decades of outside military intervention. As such, underreporting of the human toll attributable to ongoing Western interventions, whether deliberate, or through self-censorship, has been key to removing the “fingerprints” of responsibility.’
This is absolutely right. Because for our governments, there can be no such fingerprints. Our wars are good, clean wars, and any brutality, violence and death that occurs in them or as a result of them is always the responsibility of the alien Other.
And when our governments are presented with evidence that contradicts these assumptions, they may attribute it to ‘bad apples’, or ‘collateral damage’ or they may try and undermine the organizations that produce such evidence, as the Bush and Blair administrations did with the Lancet Report.
And at other times, they will simply ignore such evidence completely, in the knowledge that if they do, the ‘fourth estate’ will dutifully do the same, and then the public will never know it ever existed.
