The Military Times newspaper reported Pentagon spokesman Navy Capt. Jeff Davis as saying that both injuries were severe enough to prevent the soldiers from returning to duty.
“In both cases, these were people operating behind the forward line of troops. They were not on the front lines; they were not engaged in active combat. … They were not out trigger-pulling offensively,” it quoted Davis telling reporters on Tuesday.
The Military Times said this was the first time the US military had publicly disclosed a casualty among troops deployed to Syria.
In Iraq, the injury occurred in the vicinity of the Kurdish capital and US military base in Erbil, Davis said. The Military Times website confirmed there are currently about 4,000 US troops authorized for deployment to Iraq.
“In Syria, the service member was injured in the area north of Raqqa, where teams of US special operations troops are supporting several rebel groups advancing toward the Islamic State’s self-declared capital, Davis said,” according to the Military Times.
“A small team of about 50 US special operations troops deployed to Syria for the first time in December, and in April the White House authorized a total of 300 troops for Syria,” it confirmed.
“Both incidents involved indirect fire from Islamic State militants,” it said, adding that “neither incident involved a large-scale attack or evidence of an unusually large ISIS force, Davis said.”
Last month the US military’s Lt. David Bauders was killed in a non-combat incident in Iraq, less than a week after Navy Seal Charles Keating died in fighting near the ISIS stronghold of Mosul, as he tried to save five Kurdish Peshmerga soldiers from falling into the hands of ISIS fighters.
While the US has combat troops in Iraq the majority of its forces are there as advisors to train Iraqi and Kurdish forces in the fight against the Islamic State group (ISIS).
In March, Staff Sgt. Louis F. Cardin was killed by ISIS rocket fire against a Marine Corps artillery base in Makhmour, some 60 kilometers southwest of Erbil. The first American casualty was back in October when Master Sgt. Joshua L. Wheeler was killed rescuing 70 ISIS captives in Hawija in a joint US-Peshmerga special forces raid.
