First U.S. service member is killed in Mosul battle | McClatchy Washington Bureau

A U.S. service member who was killed Thursday by a homemade bomb in northern Iraq is the first U.S. casualty of the American-backed Iraqi battle to retake Mosul from Islamic State extremists.

Announcement of the death came from the command of the international coalition for the fight against the Islamic State, or Operation Inherent Resolve. No details – the deceased’s name, military branch or time and place of death – were included in the statement. The circumstances of the death were described only as stemming from “wounds sustained in an improvised explosive device blast in northern Iraq.”

“Further information will be released as appropriate,” the coalition command said in the statement.

While it was the first U.S. death in the Mosul battle, which began Sunday, it’s the fourth U.S. death in the broader fight against the Islamic State, which is also known as ISIS, ISIL and Daesh.

A Navy SEAL, Petty Officer 1^st Class Charles Keating, of Coronado, Calif., was killed in May during fighting near the Kurdish city of Irbil. Marine Staff Sgt. Louis Cardin, a California native who was based at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, was killed in March in an Islamic State rocket attack on a coalition post in Iraq. And Army Master Sgt. Joshua Wheeler, an Oklahoma native and member of the Army’s Delta Force, was killed in October 2015 as he accompanied Kurdish peshmerga fighters in a raid on an Islamic State compound in Hawijah, near Mosul.

The latest death Thursday underlines that American forces are on the front lines of the fight, though the Pentagon has attempted to play down the fact that U.S. troops are in combat. The idea of “boots on the ground” is anathema to the Obama administration, which seeks to avoid the connotation of the Iraq War, in which more than 4,000 U.S. forces were killed from 2003 to 2011.

Some 5,000 American forces are in Iraq now, mostly in an advisory role as the newly reconstituted Iraqi security forces and allied militias fight to reclaim Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, from the extremists who seized it in a 2014 offensive.