Military action in Syria

The main air defense system at a military base housing U.S. troops and personnel in Northeast Syria was not fully working Thursday when a drone attack killed one American contractor at the facility, multiple outlets reported Friday.

  The Hill

Biden's going to take the heat for that.

The U.S. military launched retaliatory attacks roughly 13 hours after a drone “of Iranian origin” crashed into the base near Hasakah, killing the contractor and injuring five U.S. service members and another contractor, Ryder said.

Two Air Force F-15E fighter jets struck two facilities in eastern Syria affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), with initial assessments that the facilities were destroyed.

Asked how the drone was able to crash into the base even with the radar working, Ryder shifted blame to Iranian-backed militias in the area.

“This is a dangerous part of the world. The work that we do is inherently dangerous, that’s why you have the military in these types of places conducting these types of operations,” Ryder said.

[...]

He also would not say if there was an effort to shoot down the drone, only noting that “we take a variety of measures to safeguard our people.”

That's not going to fly.

Iranian-backed fighters on Friday responded to the U.S. strikes with retaliatory rockets aimed at the Green Village base, located in the Al-Omar gas field of northeastern Syria.

Washington has not taken further strikes off the table, with CENTCOM head Gen. Michael Kurilla saying the U.S. military will “always take all necessary measures to defend our people and will always respond at a time and place of our choosing.”

[...]

Appearing on CNN Friday morning, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby skirted questions on whether the United States considered the recent attacks an “act of war.”

“We don’t seek a war with Iran. We’re not looking for an armed conflict with that country or another war in the region,” Kirby said. “We do seek to protect our mission in Syria, which is about defeating ISIS, and we do seek to make sure we can protect our people and our facilities against these Iran-backed groups.”

You have to create ISIS before you can fight ISIS>

A year into the Syrian rebellion, the US and its allies weren’t only supporting and arming an opposition they knew to be dominated by extreme sectarian groups; they were prepared to countenance the creation of some sort of “Islamic state” – despite the “grave danger” to Iraq’s unity – as a Sunni buffer to weaken Syria.

That doesn’t mean the US created Isis, of course, though some of its Gulf allies certainly played a role in it – as the US vice-president, Joe Biden, acknowledged last year. But there was no al-Qaida in Iraq until the US and Britain invaded. And the US has certainly exploited the existence of Isis against other forces in the region as part of a wider drive to maintain western control.

[...]

[The] US and western habit of playing with jihadi groups, which then come back to bite them, goes back at least to the 1980s war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, which fostered the original al-Qaida under CIA tutelage.

[...]

What’s clear is that Isis and its monstrosities won’t be defeated by the same powers that brought it to Iraq and Syria in the first place, or whose open and covert war-making has fostered it in the years since. Endless western military interventions in the Middle East have brought only destruction and division.

  Guardian

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.