The US launched large-scale airstrikes on more than 70 targets across Syria, the Pentagon said on Friday, fulfilling US President Donald Trump’s vow to strike back after the killing of two US soldiers.
“This is not the beginning of a war — it is a declaration of vengeance,” US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth wrote on social media. “Today, we hunted and we killed our enemies. Lots of them. And we will continue.”
The US Central Command said that fighter jets, attack helicopters and artillery targeted ISIS infrastructure and weapon sites.
Photo: Handout via REUTERS
“All terrorists who are evil enough to attack Americans are hereby warned — YOU WILL BE HIT HARDER THAN YOU HAVE EVER BEEN HIT BEFORE IF YOU, IN ANY WAY, ATTACK OR THREATEN THE U.S.A.,” Trump wrote in a social media post, adding that the Syrian government is “fully in support” of the US operation.
Trump had earlier promised to do “big damage” to the militants behind the deadly attack on US forces in Syria that he blamed on the Islamic State group.
US Central Command released unusually detailed imagery of the weapons systems used in the attacks that indicated coordinated strikes by the US Air Force and Army.
The images depicted F-15E Strike Eagle jets dropping GBU-31 GPS-guided munitions, AH-64 Apache helicopters that can fire Hellfire laser-guided weapons and M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, like those used in Ukraine, that fire an array of GPS-guided rockets.
The Jordanian Armed Forces also supported the operation with fighter aircraft.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights yesterday said that at least five Islamic State group members including a cell leader were killed in the strikes overnight.
Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the observatory, told reporters that “at least five members of the Islamic State group were killed” in eastern Syria’s Deir Ezzor province, including the leader of a cell responsible for drones in the area.
On Saturday last week, two US Army soldiers, along with a US interpreter, were killed in the attack in the Syrian city of Palmyra during counterterrorism operations.
The gunman was killed, according to US Central Command. Syria’s state-run SANA news agency on Sunday reported that security forces arrested five suspects in relation to the attack.
Trump also has taken pains to emphasize the attack was the work of the Islamic State — not Syria’s new government. Palmyra is outside the control of Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, who has promised to join a US-led coalition to defeat the Islamic State.
During his first term, Trump ordered strikes on Syria twice in a bid to take out then-Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s chemical weapons program. A strike in April 2017 the US military fired dozens of Tomahawk missiles at an airbase in Syria. A year later, Trump ordered strikes in three facilities linked to the chemical weapons program.
With the strikes on Friday, Trump has now launched major military actions at least three times — against Houthi rebels in Yemen, on Iran’s nuclear program and targeting alleged narcotics-traffickers in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean. Separately, his administration has also kept up a counterterrorism campaign against al-Shabab militants in Somalia.
The strikes come about a month after al-Sharaa met Trump at the White House and secured additional sanctions relief in exchange for a pledge to join a US-led coalition to defeat the Islamic State.
Sharaa’s visit capped a remarkable diplomatic transformation for the former jihadist, who one year ago had a US$10 million US bounty on his head. It also marked the first time a Syrian president has visited the White House since the country’s independence in 1946.
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