The US military carried out airstrikes in Syria after an American contractor was killed and five service members wounded when a drone “of Iranian origin” crashed into a coalition base, the Defense Department said Thursday night.
(Bloomberg) — The US military carried out airstrikes in Syria after an American contractor was killed and five service members wounded when a drone “of Iranian origin” crashed into a coalition base, the Defense Department said Thursday night.
A second contractor also was injured.
The targets of the airstrikes, according to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, were “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,” Austin said in a Pentagon statement, adding that President Joe Biden had authorized the action.
Three of the wounded military personnel and the second contractor were evacuated to medical facilities in Iraq, according to the statement, which did not provide further details, including on how the drone attack unfolded.
The other two service members were treated at the base, in northeast Syria. The contractors were not identified.
General Michael Kurilla, the leader of US Central Command, called the drone assault “another in a series of attacks on our troops and partner forces.”
“Our troops remain in Syria to ensure the enduring defeat of ISIS, which benefits the security and stability of not only Syria, but the entire region,” he said in a statement.
General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, visited Syria earlier in March and said at a Pentagon briefing afterward that “We’ve got, you know, almost 1,000 troops in Syria and — and they are at risk, they are attacked from time to time with various types of munitions by various actors that are in the area of Syria.”
Last August, US helicopters hit Iranian-backed militants in Syria after rockets were fired at bases where Americans were stationed. In June 2021, Biden ordered airstrikes in Syria and Iraq against militias tied to Iran.
His first military action as president, in February 2021, involved raids in eastern Syria on sites connected to Iranian-backed groups following a series of rocket attacks on facilities in Iraq used by the U.S., including one that killed a contractor working with the U.S.-led coalition.
(Updates with Central Command leader, starting in seventh paragraph.)
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