The US Air Force’s F-15s dropped seven 500-pound GPS-guided bombs on Iranian prosecutor fighters in eastern Syria late on Thursday. The Tomahawk cruise missiles were not used. They were not needed. The killed fighters were probably not even Syrians.
The attack was a “straight shot” and a warning to Iran, as Fox News’ Jennifer Griffin reported last night. Air Force jets have bombed an area that has not been governed by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces since the start of the civil war. It is one of the reasons why American troops have been able to deploy there near the Iraqi border in recent years to fight ISIS relatively undisturbed.
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Syrian and Russian forces are not positioned where American jets attacked last night. They have not been there for almost a decade. It is a desert region on the other side of the country of 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 against the Assad regime after chemical weapons were used to kill Syrian civilians. Fifty-nine Tomahawk missiles were launched from two US warships to destroy an air base used by the Syrian military. US intelligence said the base, located on the Mediterranean coast, was used to launch the chemical attack.
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Trump approved a second Tomahawk attack a year later to destroy Assad’s chemical weapons labs, the “Pentagon” of Syria’s chemical weapons program. French and British forces also joined in this effort. US warships in the Red Sea and even the Persian Gulf launched missiles at Syria.
The April 2018 strike marked the combat debut of the Virginia-class submarine. The USS John Warner launched six Mediterranean Tomahawks to Syria. She then dived and prepared to sink any Russian warships if they took action against any U.S. Navy ships in the area, including one that was acting as bait and did not launch missiles in Syria, the latter part has never been reported before.
These two attacks in April 2017 and 2018 were the first time the U.S. military attacked Assad’s forces in Syria after critics said Obama had given up on imposing his red line on chemical weapons.
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A better comparison for this week’s attack in eastern Syria is when Trump approved the U.S. military to launch air strikes in the same area in December 2019, when an American contractor was killed in a rocket attack in Iraq days earlier. Air Force F-15s were also used in that attack that destroyed Iran-backed fighters in eastern Syria and western Iraq.
On January 3, 2020, an American drone orbiting Baghdad international airport killed the commander of the Iranian Quds Force, Major General Qassem Soleimani, along with Iranian-backed militia leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. US military officials said Soleimani was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American soldiers during the Iraq War. They said Soleimani was also responsible for the wave of rocket attacks on U.S. bases and the embassy in Iraq.
The distinction between the Trump era strikes and this week’s strikes comes to light when a lawmaker, Rep. Lauren Boebert, from Colorado, tweeted review 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 against the Syrians last night?”