Three US soldiers ID'd from Iran drone strike as officials slam 'fingerprints'

29 January 2024 , 20:05

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Breonna Moffett was among the three Army Reservists who were killed

The three members of the US Army who were killed in the drone strike in Jordan on Sunday have been identified by the US Department of Defence.

The deceased are:

• Sgt. William Jerome Rivers, 46, of Carrollton, Ga.
• Spc. Kennedy Ladon Sanders, 24, of Waycross, Ga.
• Spc. Breonna Alexsondria Moffett, 23, of Savannah, Ga.

The three Army Reserve soldiers died "when a one-way unmanned aerial system (OWUAS) impacted their container housing units," a statement from the DoD said.

The statement continued: "Rivers, Sanders and Moffett were assigned to the 718th Engineer Company, 926th Engineer Battalion, 926th Engineer Brigade, Fort Moore, Ga." They "were supporting Operation Inherent Resolve," according to the DoD. The statement noted that "The incident is under investigation."

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A drone attack on January 28, 2024 on the frontier base in Jordan's northeast, killed three US troops (Planet Labs/AFP via Getty Images)

A US official earlier said the drone that killed three American service members evaded air defenses at Tower 22 as it was mistaken for a US drone.

The US official said that the drone got past US defence systems as what President Biden has described as a drone owned by "radical Iran-backed militant groups operating in Syria and Iraq, arrived at the same time a US drone was expected back at the base in Jordan.

The Wall Street Journal initially reported on this development on Monday and Fox News now reports a US official has confirmed the story to the outlet.

On Sunday, President Biden said the US was still "gathering the facts" regarding the "one-way" drone attack responsible for the first US casualties since the escalating conflict began. The strike was said to have injured 25 more, in the north-eastern region of Jordan, near the Syrian border.

Breonna Moffett, from Georgia, was among the deceased

Kennedy Sanders, 24, was killed in Jordan by a drone strike

Previously, the US and Iraq were expected to begin talks about the future of US military presence in the region, as Iraqi nationals call for US troops to leave the region. It came after the US and Iraq agreed to form a higher military commission in August to organise talks.

The base, known as Tower 22, sits near the demilitarized zone on the border between Jordan and Syria along a sandy, bulldozed berm marking the DMZ’s southern edge. The Iraqi border is only 10 kilometers (6 miles) away.

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The area is known as Rukban, a vast arid region that once saw a refugee camp spring up on the Syrian side over the rise of the Islamic State group’s so-called caliphate in 2014.

At its height, over 100,000 people lived there, blocked by Jordan from coming across into the kingdom at the time over concerns about infiltration by the extremist group. Those concerns grew out of a 2016 car bomb attack there that killed seven Jordanian border guards

The camp has dwindled in the time since to some 7,500 people because of a lack of supplies reaching there, according to United Nations estimates.

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The base began as a Jordanian outpost watching the border, then saw an increased U.S. presence there after American forces entered Syria in late 2015. The small installation includes U.S. engineering, aviation, logistics and security troops with about 350 U.S. Army and Air Force personnel deployed there.

The base’s location offers a site for American forces to infiltrate and quietly leave Syria. A small American garrison at al-Tanf in Syria is just 20 kilometers (12 miles) north of Tower 22. That base is along a Syrian highway leading into Iraq and ultimately Mosul, once a prominent base of the Islamic State group. It’s also a potential weapons shipment route over the road for Iran.

Communities in Georgia mourn

One of the three deceased, Kennedy Sanders, served as an engineer in the US military. She was a citizen-soldier from Waycross, Georgia, and was part of a family where her father had served in the Marine Corps, and her mother had been a member of the county school board.

Sanders's father, Shawn Sanders, said: "She was loved. She didn’t have any enemies. All the time you saw her smiling. This is somebody who was just living life, enjoying life at a young age, working toward a career."

Sanders volunteered to deploy and had previously been deployed to Djibouti. She recently volunteered to go to Kuwait, where she was stationed near the Syrian border in Jordan. The news of her death brought an outpouring of grief and support in her hometown of Waycross.

Sanders' mother said her daughter had talked recently of becoming a full-time Army soldier on active duty once her reservist contract had been fulfilled. She was considering buying a home. And she looked forward to more trips abroad and had been studying Italian in anticipation of someday visiting Italy.

Oneida Sanders said: "All of these different things that she had plans for, you know, were just cut short in the blink of an eye. I just feel like somebody like her, that’s so full of life, it’s just unfair that she’ll never get to realize those dreams that she had."

Vassia Barba