The US navy mentioned it carried out precision airstrikes in jap Syria on Thursday in response to a drone assault that killed one American contractor and injured 5 US service personnel.
A Department of Defense assertion mentioned the US contractor had been killed and the others wounded “after a one-way unmanned aerial vehicle struck a maintenance facility on a Coalition base near Hasakah in northeast Syria.”
Another US contractor was additionally injured within the UAV assault, the Pentagon mentioned, including that the US intelligence neighborhood “assess the UAV to be of Iranian origin.”
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin mentioned that on the course of President Joe Biden, he had approved “precision airstrikes tonight in eastern Syria against facilities used by groups affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.”
“The airstrikes were conducted 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,” he added.
Hundreds of US troops are in Syria as a part of a coalition combating in opposition to remnants of the Islamic State (IS) group and have often been focused in assaults by militia teams.
The US troops help the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the Kurds’ de facto military within the space, which led the battle that dislodged IS from the final scraps of their Syrian territory in 2019.
Two of the service members injured on Thursday had been handled onsite, whereas the three different troops and one US contractor had been medically evacuated to Iraq, the Pentagon mentioned.
“As President Biden has made clear, we will take all necessary measures to defend our people and will always respond at a time and place of our choosing,” Austin mentioned.
When the strikes had been introduced, Biden had already traveled to Canada, the place he’s set to fulfill with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and handle Parliament.
Last August, Biden ordered comparable retaliatory strikes within the oil-rich Syrian province of Deir Ezzor after a number of drones focused a coalition outpost, with out inflicting any casualties.
That assault got here the identical day that Iranian state media introduced a Revolutionary Guard basic had been killed days earlier whereas “on a mission in Syria as a military adviser.”
Iran says it has deployed its forces in Syria on the invitation of Damascus and solely as advisers.
The IRGC is the ideological arm of the Iranian navy and is blacklisted as a terrorist group by the United States. —Agence France-Presse
Source: www.gmanetwork.com
