The U.S. Air Force F-15s dropped seven 500-pound GPS-guided bombs on Iranian proxy fighters in eastern Syria on Thursday night. Tomahawk cruise missiles were not used. They were not needed. The fighters killed were also probably not even Syrians.
The strike was a “shot in the arm” and a warning to Iran, as Jennifer Griffin of Fox News reported last night. The air force jets have bombed an area that has not been controlled by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces since the beginning of the civil war. This is one of the reasons why American troops have been able to deploy along the border with Iraq in recent years to fight ISIS relatively undisturbed.
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Syrian and Russian forces are not deployed where US jets struck last night. They have been there for almost a decade. It is a desert area on the other side of the country from Damascus and coastal areas where the vast majority of Syrians live. (Syria is about 1.5 times the size of Pennsylvania.)
In April 2017, then-President Donald Trump approved a Tomahawk cruise missile attack on Assad’s government after chemical weapons were used to kill Syrian civilians. Fifty-nine Tomahawk missiles were launched from two U.S. warships to destroy an air base used by the Syrian army. U.S. intelligence said the base, located off the coast of the Mediterranean, was used to launch the chemical attack.
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Trump approved a second Tomahawk strike a year later to destroy Assad’s chemical weapons labs, the “Pentagon” of Syria’s chemical weapons program. French and British forces also took part. American warships in the Red Sea and as far as the Persian Gulf sent missiles to Syria.
The April 2018 strike was the combat debut for the submarine in the Virginia class. USS John Warner has launched six Tomahawks from the Mediterranean to Syria. She then dives and prepares to sink any Russian warships if they act against any US naval vessels in the area, including one that acts as a lure and does not send a missile to Syria, and has never been reported before. the last part.
These two strikes in April 2017 and 2018 were the first time the U.S. military hit Assad’s forces in Syria, after critics said Obama withdrew when he enforced his red line on chemical weapons.
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A better comparison for this week’s strike in eastern Syria is when Trump approved the US military to launch airstrikes in the same area in December 2019 when a US contractor was killed in Iraq a few days earlier. Air Force F-15s were also used in that strike that destroyed Iranian-backed fighters in both eastern Syria and western Iraq.
On January 3, 2020, an American drone orbiting Baghdad International Airport killed Iranian Quds Force Commander-in-Chief Qassem Soleimani along with Iranian-backed militia leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. U.S. military officials said Soleimani was responsible for the killing of hundreds of U.S. troops during the Iraq war. They said Soleimani was also responsible for the spate of rocket attacks on US bases and the embassy in Iraq.
The distinction between the Trump era strikes and this week’s strikes comes as one lawmaker, Representative Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., tweeted the criticism of President Biden on Friday, also accusing him of launching ‘tomahawk missiles’ in Syria, writing: ‘What is the proper pronoun for the tomahawk missiles that Joe Biden launched on Syrians last night?’