US likely to carry out more raids on Islamic State after rescuing 70 hostages and preventing ‘horrific massacre’ in Iraq
Secretary of Defence Ash Carter insists the operation yielded “a significant cache of intelligence”.
Defence Secretary Ash Carter on Friday promised that American forces would participate in more raids like the rescue mission that left an elite Delta Force commando dead. But Carter insisted that those plans will not violate President Barack Obama’s pledge of no American “boots-on-the-ground” in the campaign against the Islamic State.
A day after the US-Kurdish raid that freed 70 hostages from an Islamic State prison in Hawija, Iraq, Carter portrayed the dead commando, Army Master Sgt. Joshua Wheeler, as a hero who was a credit to his Army Special Operations Command training at Fort Bragg, N.C.
They expected to be executed that day, after morning prayers
Wheeler, 39, a native of Oklahoma, was the first American to be killed in Iraq by hostile forces in almost four years. With the exit of most U.S. troops completed, Obama declared a formal end to the United States’ 11-year combat mission in August 2011.
When he ordered the first of 3,000 troops back to Iraq in June 2014, Obama maintained that the Americans’ assignment was only to train Iraqi soldiers, not to engage in ground combat.
Carter maintained that position while at the same time warning the Islamic State to expect more surprise attacks by US commandos.
Saying “we’ll do more raids”, Carter explained: “It doesn’t represent us assuming a combat role. It represents a continuation of our advise-and-assist mission.”
One of Wheeler’s representatives in Congress, Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, wasn’t buying Carter’s parsing of meaning.
“While the [Obama] administration declared an official end to our combat mission in Iraq in 2011, Oklahomans and our nation are reminded today that combat is still a reality for our all-volunteer force in the Middle East,” Inhofe said.
Carter said he authorised the raid in order to save the lives of hostages who were in imminent mortal danger and that the raid was a success.
“We have now heard from rescued hostages,” Carter said. “They expected to be executed that day, after morning prayers. Their grave had already been prepared.”
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Using the government’s preferred acronym for the Islamic State, he added: “Not only did our support help prevent another mass killing, we enabled those [Kurdish] partners of ours to deliver ISIL a clear defeat and prevented them from broadcasting a horrific massacre to the world.”
The United States obtained “a significant cache of intelligence” during the raid, Carter said. The Pentagon had said earlier that five Islamic State militants were captured; six to 20 of the jihadists were killed, according to various reports.
“You learn a great deal because you collect the documentation, you collect various electronic equipment and so forth,” he said. “On top of which, we now have 70 individuals who spent a lot of time there and who were, in turn, captured by ISIL in different ways and thereby had different perspectives.”
