According to the Pentagon, American forces carried out retaliatory strikes in Syria in response to a deadly drone attack on a US-led coalition base in the country’s northeast.
According to the Department of Defense, one US contractor was killed and five American troops and a contractor were injured after “a one-way unmanned aerial vehicle” struck a maintenance facility near Hasakah around midday on Thursday. “The intelligence community believes the UAV is of Iranian origin,” it continued.
Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin said in the same statement that President Joe Biden had directed him to authorize “precision airstrikes tonight in eastern Syria against facilities used by groups affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).”
According to Austin, the bombings were carried out “in response to today’s attack as well as a series of recent attacks against Coalition forces in Syria by groups affiliated with the IRGC.”
“No group will strike our troops with impunity,” Austin insisted, adding that the United States would “always respond at a time and place of our choosing.”
The location of the strikes was not revealed by the US secretary of defense, but footage on social media allegedly showed explosions in Syria’s eastern province of Deir ez-Zor, which borders Iraq.
According to local sources, the US missiles did not strike any facilities associated with Iranian groups. Instead, they claimed, a rural development center and a grain facility were struck.
According to the broadcaster, “no Iranian was killed in the act of aggression.” It also cited an unidentified military source who promised that “resistance groups” would respond to the American strikes.
After being deployed in the mid-2010s under the guise of fighting Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) militants, approximately 900 US troops remain in oil-rich northeastern Syria. Damascus considers their presence to be illegal and has filed numerous complaints with the UN. Russia and Iran, which have aided Syria in its fight against terrorism, support the Syrian government’s position.
A Republican-sponsored bill calling for the withdrawal of American forces from Syria failed to pass in the US Congress earlier this month, losing by a vote of 103 to 321.
