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Published On 3 Dec 20243 Dec 2024

Washington, DC – The Pentagon has confirmed that the United States carried out a strike against military assets in eastern Syria after a rocket attack near one of its bases.

Pentagon spokesperson Pat Ryder told reporters on Tuesday that the US military struck weapons systems — including rocket launchers and a tank — that “presented a clear and imminent threat” to its forces in the area.

The US strike comes as violence escalates across the war-torn country. Over the last week, armed opposition groups carried out a blistering offensive in northwest Syria against the government forces led by President Bashar al-Assad, ushering in a new stage of the country’s long-running civil war.

The offensive has raised questions about how the US might respond and whether it could become entangled in the conflict, given its significant military presence in Syria.

Ryder said on Tuesday that the attack was in response to a rocket launch that fell “in the vicinity” of Military Support Site (MSS) Euphrates, a US base in eastern Syria.

He added that it is not clear who was operating the weapons, but Iran-backed groups and Syrian government forces are known to be in the area.

The Pentagon spokesperson stressed that the action is “not linked to any broader activities in northwest Syria by other groups”.

But on Tuesday, Damascus accused the US of providing air support for the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which pushed to advance against government-controlled villages east of the Euphrates River, near the city of Deir ez-Zor.

The SDF has received US support for years under the stated aim of fighting ISIL (ISIS).

Syrian state-run Alikhbaria TV reported on Tuesday that clashes were taking place between SDF and government forces near the village of Tabiyet Jazira “with the intervention of US occupation jets that are targeting the frontlines in the area”.

The SDF had claimed earlier in the day that it took control of seven villages east of the Euphrates due to the “serious threat related to the imminent movement of large ISIS terrorist cells”.

“The deployment of our forces to these villages is in response to the urgent pleas and appeals of the local populace, following the increasing potential risks that ISIS will exploit the events in the west of the country,” the SDF’s Deir ez-Zor Military Council said in a statement.

But the Syrian government said the villages remain under its control.

Farther west, government troops have been battling rebels trying to advance towards the central city of Hama as the front lines of the war, which had gone mostly dormant over the past four years, see major shifts.

Rebel groups, led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which had been confined to the northwestern Idlib province, launched their offensive last week, taking control of Aleppo and heading south towards Hama.

The country had experienced relative calm since 2020 with the government, rebel groups and SDF largely remaining within their unofficial territories.

But the opposition appears to have struck at an opportune moment when President al-Assad’s main military backers — Russia, Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah — are focusing on their own conflicts elsewhere.

The US, which calls Assad a “brutal dictator”, has denied any involvement in the rebels’ offensive, highlighting that Washington considers HTS to be a “terrorist” group.

HTS is a reiteration of al-Nusra Front, which operated as al-Qaeda’s branch in Syria early in the war.

According to the Pentagon, Washington has 900 troops in Syria and a deep alliance with the SDF, one of the major parties to the conflict.

On Tuesday, the Pentagon’s Ryder declined to answer questions about the SDF’s operations in the Deir ez-Zor area.

“Our focus has been on working with the SDF as it relates to countering ISIS, and that continues to be our focus,” he said.