More information on our SEAL hero and the situation on the ground in Iraq that took his life.
When a team of less than a dozen U.S. military advisers came under attack in Iraq Tuesday from more than 100 ISIS fighters, Navy SEAL Charles Keating IV was part of the force sent in to rescue them.
All the advisers made it back. Keating, a decorated combat veteran and star athlete who decided to enlist after the 9/11 attacks, did not.
Providing new details Wednesday about the operation that took the life of the grandson of prominent financier and World War II pilot Charles Keating Jr., Coalition spokesman Col. Steve Warren said that the clash between ISIS and the Kurdish Peshmerga forces the advisers were assisting was “a big fight, one of the largest we’ve seen recently.”
Keating’s death is the third American combat loss since the U.S. redeployed forces to Iraq in the summer of 2014 to advise local forces and conduct Special Operations missions against ISIS. The 31-year-old Special Warfare Operator 1st Class was on his third tour in Iraq…
Defense Secretary Ash Carter told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in Germany that Keating’s death was “tragic” and called his actions “heroic.”
He added that Keating’s death “shows us this is a risky campaign. …. We will defeat ISIL but there is risk associated with it.”
Keating’s relatives also used the word hero to describe the fallen soldier.
“He is our family hero in every sense of the word,” cousin Elizabeth Ann Keating told CNN.
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