America launched airstrikes in Syria after the drone attack

A strike Thursday by a suspected Iranian-made drone killed a U.S. contractor and wounded six other Americans in northeastern Syria, and U.S. forces retaliated with airstrikes on areas in Syria that were used by groups affiliated with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, the Pentagon said. Activists said the US bombing killed at least four people.

While this is not the first time the US and Iran have exchanged strikes in Syria, the attack and the US response threaten to upend recent efforts to de-escalate tensions across the wider Middle East, whose rival powers have taken steps toward détente in recent days after years of turmoil.

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in a statement that the American intelligence community had determined that the drone was of Iranian origin, but offered no other immediate evidence to support the claim. The drone hit a coalition base in the northeastern Syrian city of Hasaka. The injured included five American service members and a US contractor.

Austin said the strikes were a response to the drone attack “as well as a series of new attacks against coalition forces in Syria” by groups affiliated with the Revolutionary Guard.

Iran relies on a network of proxy forces through the Mideast to counter the US and Israel, the region’s arch enemy. The US has had forces in northeastern Syria since 2015, when they deployed as part of the fight against the Islamic State group, and maintains about 900 troops there, working with Kurdish-led forces that controls almost a third of Syria.

US airstrikes hit targets in three towns in eastern Syria, activists said. Overnight, videos on social media purportedly showed explosions in Deir el-Zour, a strategic province that borders Iraq and has oil fields. Iranian-backed militia groups and Syrian forces control the area, which has also seen suspected Israeli airstrikes in recent months targeting Iranian supply routes.

According to a defense official, the US counter strikes were carried out by F-15 fighter jets flying from al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss military operations.

According to a US official, US F-15s hit three locations, all around Deir el-Zour.

The activist group Deir Ezzor 24, which covers news in the province, said the American strikes killed four people and wounded several others, including Iraqis.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition war monitor, put the death toll in the US strikes at 11 Iran-backed fighters – including six at an arms depot in the Harabesh neighborhood of the city of Deir. el-Zour and five others in military posts near the towns of Mayadeen and Boukamal.

Rami Abdurrahman who heads the Observatory said three rockets were fired early Friday at the al-Omar oil field in Deir el-Zour where US troops live, an apparent retaliation for the American strikes.

The Associated Press could not immediately independently confirm the activist’s reports. Iran and Syria did not immediately acknowledge the strikes, nor did their United Nations officials in New York respond to requests for comment from the AP.

Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, which answers only to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is suspected of launching attacks using bomb-carrying drones in the wider Middle East.

The exchange of strikes came as Saudi Arabia and Iran working to reopen embassies in individual countries. The kingdom also recognized the efforts of reopening the Saudi embassy in Syriawhose embattled President Bashar Assad is backed by Iran in his country’s long war.

Gen. Michael “Erik” Kurilla of the US Army, the head of the US military’s Central Command, warned that its forces could carry out additional strikes if necessary. “We are positioned for scalable options in the face of any further Iranian attacks,” Kurilla said in a statement.

Speaking to the US House Armed Services Committee on Thursday, Kurilla warned lawmakers that “Iran today is much more capable militarily than it was five years ago.” He pointed to Iran’s arsenal of ballistic missiles and bomb-carrying drones.

“What Iran is doing to hide its hand is that they are using Iranian proxies,” Kurilla said.

According to officials, Iran has launched 80 attacks against US forces and locations in Iraq and Syria since January 2021. The majority of those were in Syria.

Diplomacy to reduce the exchange appears to have started immediately. Qatar’s foreign minister spoke by phone with US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan as well as Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian, the Qatari state news agency reported. Doha has been the interlocutor between Iran and the US recently amid tensions over Tehran’s nuclear program.

Austin said he authorized the retaliatory strikes at the direction of President Joe Biden.

“As President Biden has made clear, we will take all necessary steps to protect our people and always respond at a time and place of our choosing,” Austin said. “No group will attack our troops with impunity.”

The US under Biden has struck Syria before because of tensions with Iran – in February and June of 2021, as well as in August 2022.

Dareen Khalifa, a senior Syria analyst at the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, said while Thursday’s exchange of strikes comes at a sensitive political time because of the “general deterioration of relations with the US -Iran and the cessation of nuclear talks,” he did not expect a significant increase.

“These tit-for-tat strikes have been going on for a long time,” Khalifa said, though he noted that they usually don’t result in casualties.

While “the danger of an escalatory cycle is there,” he said, “I don’t think the Biden administration will be eager to escalate Syria now and instead have a relatively measured response.”

Since the US drone strike that killed Revolutionary Guard Gen. Qassem Soleimani in 2020, Iran intends to “make life difficult for US forces stationed east of the Euphrates,” said Hamidreza Azizi, an expert at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.

“Iran has increased its support for local proxies in Deir el-Zour while trying to ally with tribal forces in the area,” Azizi wrote in a recent analysis. “Due to the geographical proximity, the Iraqi groups also intensified their activities along the border with Syria and in the province of Deir el-Zour.”

The strikes come during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

The war in Syria began with the 2011 Arab Spring protests that roiled the wider Middle East and toppled governments in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen. This later turned into a regional proxy conflict that saw Russia and Iran turn on Assad. The United Nations estimates that more than 300,000 civilians have died in the war. Those numbers do not include soldiers and rebels killed in the conflict; their number is believed to be in the tens of thousands.



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