The United States says its military has carried out a “massive strike” against the Islamic State (IS) group in Syria, in response to a deadly attack on US forces in the country.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Operation Hawkeye Strike was aimed at eliminating IS “fighters, infrastructure and weapons sites.”
Fighter jets, attack helicopters and artillery hit multiple targets in central Syria, US officials told CBS, the BBC’s US media partner. Planes from Jordan also participated.
President Donald Trump later said that “we are striking very hard” against IS strongholds, following the Dec. 13 IS ambush in the city of Palmyra that left two U.S. soldiers and a U.S. civilian interpreter dead.
In a post on
“If you target Americans – anywhere in the world – you will spend the rest of your short, anxious life knowing that the United States will hunt you down, find you, and kill you without mercy.
“Today we hunt and kill our enemies. Many of them. And we will continue,” added the US Secretary of Defense.
Meanwhile, the US Central Command (Centcom) said that “US forces have initiated a large-scale attack” against IS, adding that more information would be provided soon.
Later, in a post on Truth Social, President Trump said the United States “is inflicting very serious retaliation, as promised, on the murderous terrorists responsible.”
He said the Syrian government was “fully supported.”
Meanwhile, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (OBHR) said IS positions near the cities of Raqqa and Deir ez Zor were attacked.
He said a prominent IS leader and several fighters were killed.
ISIS has not made public comments. The BBC could not immediately verify the targets.
Centcom, which leads US military operations in Europe, Africa and the Indo-Pacific, previously said the deadly attack in Palmyra was carried out by an IS gunman, who was “engaged and killed”.
Three other US soldiers were wounded in the ambush, and a Pentagon official said it occurred “in an area where the Syrian president has no control.”
At the same time, SOHR said the attacker was a member of the Syrian security forces.
No group has claimed responsibility for the attack and the identity of the gunman has not been revealed.
In 2019, a US-backed alliance of Syrian fighters announced that IS had lost the last area of territory in Syria it controlled, but the jihadist group has since carried out some attacks.
The United Nations says the group still has between 5,000 and 7,000 fighters in Syria and Iraq.
US troops have maintained a presence in Syria since 2015 to help train other forces as part of a campaign against IS.
