US president attends dignified transfer of 3 US service members killed in Jordan drone attack

By Diyar Guldogan

WASHINGTON (AA) - US President Joe Biden attended the dignified transfer of three US service members Friday who were killed Sunday in a drone attack in Jordan.

Biden was accompanied by first lady Jill Biden during the ceremony at the Dover Air Force Base in the state of Delaware.

The officials, including Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. CQ Brown and family members of the soldiers, observed the "somber transfer" of the bodies that returned from abroad.

Biden met the families of the soldiers at the Center for Families of the Fallen.

"They risked it all, and we’ll never forget (their) sacrifices and service to our country,” Biden said Thursday at a national prayer breakfast in Washington.

The Pentagon announced Monday that Sgt. William Jerome Rivers, Spc. Kennedy Ladon Sanders and Spc. Breonna Alexsondria Moffett were killed in an unmanned aerial drone attack on Tower 22, a remote military installation in Jordan near the Syrian and Iraqi borders.

An umbrella group of Iranian-backed militias calling itself the Islamic Resistance in Iraq claimed responsibility.

"The President will not tolerate attacks on American troops and neither will I. Our teammates were killed by radical militias backed by Iran and operating inside Syria and Iraq," Austin said Thursday.