The United States and Gulf Arab allies, including Saudi Arabia, conducted joint airstrikes within Syria’s borders for the first time primarily on Islamic State targets in and around Raqqa, several news agencies and CENTCOM are reporting.
Islamic State militants bore the brunt of the large-scale attack, which included strikes from various aircraft and also missile attacks from the sea, but other militants including the Al Nusra Front and the little known Khorasan group were also targeted.
Joining the U.S. and Saudi Arabia in the strikes were four other regional allies, Bahrain, Jordan, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, CENTCOM said.
The U.S. alone fired “47 [Tomahawk cruise missiles] launched from USS Arleigh Burke and USS Philippine Sea operating from international waters in the Red Sea and North Arabian Gulf, as well as U.S. Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps fighter, remotely piloted and bomber aircraft deployed to the U.S. Central Command area of operations,” NPR reported from the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM).
Military experts discuss the U.S.-Arab airstrikes on IS positions in Syria.
In the first such cooperation since the two countries drove back the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein’s forces in 1990, the U.S. and Saudi Arabia conducted joint airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria last night, bringing what analysts called “heavy firepower” to weaken the extremist group’s bases and other capabilities beyond Iraq’s borders.
The alliance of nations taking the fight to the Islamic State represents a significant moment in U.S.-Arab relations. After failing in 2003 to win the backing of Arab states in the Bush Administration’s war in Iraq, that the United States is now directly cooperating with moderate Arab governments.
Speaking last week in Tampa, Florida, at MacDill Air Force Base, President Obama addressed airstrikes against the Islamic State, which considers the U.S. and its Gulf Arab allies its enemy. “In a world where technology provides a small group of killers with the ability to do terrible harm, it is America that has the capacity and the will to mobilize the world against terrorists –- including the group in Syria and Iraq known as ISIL.…[I]f left unchecked, they could pose a growing threat to the United States.”
The first U.S. incursion into Syrian airspace is will present new challenges to the Obama administration as it seeks to eradicate the Islamic State. “In intervening in Syria, the United States is injecting its military might into a messy and brutal civil war between the government of President Bashar al-Assad, the Islamic State and a range of rebels group who originally took up arms to fight Mr. Assad but have also come to oppose the Islamic State,” the New York Times reports today.
