Army officer, Navy cryptologist, an interpreter and Defense Department civilian identified as the four Americans killed in suicide bomb attack outside Syria restaurant
- Wednesday’s suicide bombing, claimed by the Islamic State group, was the deadliest to hit US troops since they deployed to Syria in 2014
- Three of the four Americans killed have been identified including Defense Department civilian Scott A. Wirtz of St. Louis, Missouri
- Army Chief Warrant Officer 2 Jonathan R. Farmer, 37, of Boynton Beach, Florida, Navy Chief Cryptologic Technician Shannon M. Kent, 35, of upstate New York
- The fourth American, an interpreter working for the Defense Department, has not yet been named
Three of the four Americans killed in a suicide bomb blast in Syria have been identified.
Army Chief Warrant Officer 2 Jonathan R Farmer, 37, of Boynton Beach, Florida, Navy Chief Cryptologic Technician (Interpretive) Shannon M Kent, 35, of upstate New York and Defense Department civilian Scott A Wirtz of St Louis, Missouri, were all killed in the explosion.
The fourth American, an interpreter working for the Defense Department, has not yet been named, Fox News reports.
Wednesday’s suicide bombing, claimed by the Islamic State group, was the deadliest to hit US troops since they deployed to Syria in 2014.
Nineteen people were killed in the attack on the grill house in the central market of the flashpoint northern town of Manbij.
Run by a Washington-backed town council since the US-led coalition and its ground partners pushed out jihadists in 2016, Manbij has been a realm of relative quiet.
The town was considered sufficiently secure that a group of top US military commanders and lawmakers strolled through the same market place without body armor during a tour of the area last summer.
Wednesday’s suicide bombing, claimed by the Islamic State group, was the deadliest to hit US troops since they deployed to Syria in 2014. A member of Manbij’s security forces patrols the site of a suicide attack targeting US-led coalition forces in the flashpoint northern Syrian city
But the US military presence in the town has been thrown into question after Donald Trump’s shock announcement last month that he would pull all American troops from Syria, claiming the IS had been ‘largely defeated’.
Senator Lindsey Graham, a longtime Trump supporter who was among this summer’s visitors, has been one of the most vocal critics of the president’s decision and was in Ankara for talks with top officials on Friday.
Next to the blast site, Abu Abdel Rahman lifted an armful of red teddy bears out of his storefront display, carefully avoiding the shattered glass. His shop was hit by the blast.
‘I was at the door of my shop and saw a fireball come out of the restaurant. Then, there were body parts on the ground,’ he told AFP, a red keffiyeh headscarf wrapped around his face to help fend off the cold winter air.
The attack came as tensions between Washington’s Syrian Kurdish ground partner and its NATO ally Turkey flare.
Ankara views the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) as a ‘terrorist offshoot’ of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has waged a deadly insurgency for self-rule in southeastern Turkey since 1984.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has threatened an all-out offensive to clear the group from its border.
At the town’s entrance, security checkpoints manned by forces of the US-backed Manbij Military Council meticulously check vehicles and the IDs of people entering and exiting the town.
After sweeping across swathes of Syria and Iraq in 2014, the jihadists’ cross-border ‘caliphate’ has been erased by multiple offensives and is now confined to a tiny embattled enclave in eastern Syria close to the Iraqi border.
But despite the stinging defeats, ISIS has proved it is still capable of carrying out deadly attacks using hideouts in the sprawling desert or sleeper cells in the towns.