First US Soldier Killed in Combat with Daesh/ ISIL as 70 Hostages Freed

http://www.juancole.com/2015/10/soldier-combat-hostages.html

First US Soldier Killed in Combat with Daesh/ ISIL as 70 Hostages Freed
By Juan Cole | Oct. 23, 2015

A joint operation by US Delta force and Iraqi Kurdish freed 70 captives on Thursday, led to killing of 20 and the capture of 6 Daesh (ISIS, ISIL) forces, and left one US soldier dead. He was the first US military casualty in the struggle between Washington and the phony caliphate.

Hawija is a largely Sunni Arab town west of the mostly Kurdish city of Kirkuk in northeastern Iraq, and it has been in the hands of Daesh (ISIL, ISIS) for at least the past year. Outside of Hawija in a village called Fadhika, there is a prison camp run by Daesh. Prison camp is perhaps an inaccurate word. Holding cell for those about to be executed seems more like it. Hawija has about 50,000 residents inside city borders.



On Tuesday, Daesh murdered 18 persons at the camp, something that came to the attention of the US command and the Kurdistan Peshmerga or national guard (The Kurdistan Regional Authority is an ethnic superprovince in northern Iraq). There were rumors that Daesh had stashed a large number of captured Kurdish peshmerga at the compound and was planning to kill them all and roll them into a mass grave.

So on Thursday morning, two elite teams of fighters went in. One is the Kurdistan Counter-Terrorism Group (CTG). The other is US Delta Force.