Biden receives bodies of soldiers killed in Jordan
DOVER (AFP) – US President Joe Biden yesterday oversaw the return to the United States of the bodies of three American soldiers, killed in a drone attack at a base in Jordan that Washington has blamed on Iran-backed militants.
Amid strikes between US forces and Iran-backed groups in Iraq and Syria, as well as exchanges with Yemen’s Houthi rebels, these were the first US military personnel killed by hostile fire in the region following the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel.
The bodies of William Jerome Rivers, Kennedy Ladon Sanders and Breonna Alexsondria Moffett were brought to an air force base in Dover, Delaware, where they were received with military honors.
The President previously received bodies at the base following the Aug. 26, 2021 bombing at Kabul airport, during the US pullout from Afghanistan.
The White House has said a militia called the Islamic Resistance
in Iraq was behind the attack on the base in Jordan, near the Syrian border. Biden has vowed a response, the nature and timing of which have not been declared publicly.
Pressure is mounting on the
Democratic president during an election year where Republicans, including his predecessor Donald Trump, hope to retake the White House.
The Democrat, who has suffered many family tragedies of his own, is known to get emotional when greeting mourning Americans.
He already called each of the three families of the soldiers killed in Jordan, in part to make sure they were OK with his presence at the ceremony.
“I know there is nothing anybody can say or do to ease the pain, I’ve been there,” Biden said in one call, recorded and shared by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper.
“I got one of these phone calls,” Biden says in the video, his voice coming in over speakerphone, referring to the death in a car accident of his first wife and their infant daughter in 1972.
His son Beau died of cancer in 2015.