Washington, Pentagon. The United States managed to get another two of its best soldiers killed by their own troops in a shootout with ISIS forces in Afghanistan. Now more resources, tax dollars and time will be spent on investigating the screw up by American military leaders, under Donald Trump’s leadership.
The American Defense Department on Friday released the names of two Army Rangers who died during a raid on an ISIS compound in Afghanistan on Thursday.
Sgt. Joshua P. Rodgers, 22, and Sgt. Cameron H. Thomas, 23, were killed by small arms fire during an operation targeting the emir of the Afghan branch of the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq (ISIS) in Nangarhar province, the Pentagon announced.
The battle in which they were killed took place south of an ISIS cave complex targeted in April by the largest non-nuclear bomb ever used by the U.S. in combat, media sources reported.
Of deeper concern from the Trump Administration perspective is the Pentagon is investigating whether the soldiers died as a result of friendly fire.”That may have been what happened here,” Pentagon spokesman Capt. Jeff Davis said during a briefing Friday.
The raid was conducted by 50 Army Rangers and 40 Afghan commandos on Thursday, the Pentagon said. The target of the raid was Abdul Hasid, the emir of ISIS Khorasan, the group’s Afghan branch. Hasid was believed to be hiding in the compound close to the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan
Rodgers was from Bloomington, Illinois, and Thomas was from Kettering, Ohio. Both were on their third deployments to Afghanistan and assigned to a Ranger regiment based out of Fort Benning, Georgia, according to the Pentagon. President Trump promised in the 2016 elections to bring all US soldiers abroad home, leave NATO, improve Russian-US relations and “make America great again.”