Draper • A Utah National Guard member was killed and 11 others were injured Wednesday while they were clearing a booby-trapped building that exploded during a mission battling loyalists with the Islamic State group in eastern Afghanistan, Gov. Gary Herbert said Thursday.
During a news conference at the Utah National Guard headquarters in Draper, Herbert said the Department of Defense would release names of the Guard members after notification of family. He said the names would not be released until this Thursday evening at the earliest.
“I will be calling the families today who have been involved in this incident, and let them know of our concern, our support and our condolences,” the governor said.
The 12-member Utah National Guard team is made of nine Utahns, including the soldier killed. The other three hail from states adjacent to Utah, and fly to the Beehive State to train and when they deploy, Utah Guard spokeswoman Ileen Kennedy said.
Herbert declined to give identifying information the Guard unit or when they were deployed. But in recent years, the Utah National Guard’s 19th Special Forces Group has been repeatedly deployed to Afghanistan to fight alongside that country’s military. In January 2016, a unit from the 19th Special Forces Group, based at Camp Williams in Bluffdale, was in a battle that killed a soldier from Washington.
“It is a reminder to all of us that the war on terror continues,” Herbert said. “We have not had a [Utah Guard] fatality since 2010, so we think things are maybe not as severe as they really are. Our men and women are serving in very difficult places throughout the world.”
The Utah Guard team had been working alongside the Afghan army on a ground mission working to push out the Islamic State affiliate in the region, officials said. They would not say specifically where the team was operating.
“My heart aches for the loss and sacrifice of our members and their families,” Maj. Gen. Jefferson Burton, adjutant general of the Utah National Guard, said in a Wednesday news release. “I know that what we do is dangerous and important work for our country’s defense, but this realization does little to console me during times of loss such as this.”
Burton said Wednesday night that he was still trying to learn the conditions of the injured Guard members who were initially evacuated to an Afghanistan field hospital. Kennedy said Thursday she was unsure if the wounded were still being treated in Afghanistan, or if they had been moved elsewhere.
The Utah National Guard has more than 130 members operating in the Central Command region, which includes Afghanistan, Iraq, and several other countries in the Middle East, northern Africa and Asia, Burton said. That’s out of a total of 193 Utah Guard soldiers and airmen deployed abroad, Kennedy said.
The last Utah National Guard soldier to be killed in action was Sgt. 1st Class James Thode, a 45-year-old police sergeant from Farmington, N.M., who died in December 2010 from a roadside bomb. His unit was clearing land mines in Afghanistan’s Khowst province.
The last time any Utah service member was killed in combat was in 2013, when 21-year-old Army medic Pfc. Cody Towse, of Salem, was the victim of an improvised explosive device in Afghanistan.
Eleven U.S. service members have died in Afghanistan this year, up from 10 in 2016.
The Islamic State affiliate in Afghanistan is known as Khorasan, or ISIS-K — a branch of the terrorist organization’s primary base in Iraq and Syria. Afghan and U.S. forces launched a major offensive against ISIS-K in March, according to the Department of Defense. In April and July, American airstrikes — including the so-called mother of all bombs — killed several of the group’s leaders.
About 14,000 U.S. and NATO troops remain in Afghanistan after nearly 16 years there.
“We appreciate the patriotism, the courage of our men and women in uniform,” Herbert said. “And it’s something we as Utahns ought not to forget, and always remember, [to] keep them all in our prayers for their safety and well-being.”