The US military operates about a dozen occupation bases in strategic energy and food-rich areas of northeastern Syria.
Washington has used the invasion in combination with crushing sanctions as part of a strategy aimed at suffocating Damascus economically after failing to oust its internationally-recognized government in a CIA-backed dirty war.
US occupation forces went on high alert early Saturday morning after a kamikaze drone attacked the Kharab al-Jir Air Base in Syria’s Hasakah province.
Regional media citing local sources reported multiple explosions inside the base, with no information given on the extent of possible damage to the facility or possible casualties. No group or faction has claimed responsibility.
Media reported earlier that a US military cargo aircraft had arrived at the base on Friday, carrying military and logistical equipment and about two dozen troops.
An anonymous US defense official confirmed to US media that the base had been targeted. Initial reports do not indicate any injuries, however medical evaluations are ongoing. We are currently conduction a damage assessment.
The escalating violence follows efforts by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces militia this week to enforce a blockade targeting the Syrian government-controlled eastern cities of al-Hasakah and Qamishli.
Including by blocking deliveries of food and fuel, after accusing them of facilitating an attack in Deir ez-Zor region on Wednesday by local nomadic Arab tribesmen restless over the SDF’s ongoing occupation.
Syrian media reported Friday that nine members of one family were injured, three of them gravely, in a shelling attack in Deir ez-Zor by SDF fighters targeting their home.
A Syrian military source told Sputnik last week that the US occupation forces have ramped up their presence in Hasakah province with 15 Apache helicopter gunships amid escalating regional violence.
The US illegally maintains at least 900 troops in Syria, and 2,500 more in neighboring Iraq. An Iraqi militia leader recently vowed to draw up a timetable for the US’s expulsion from the country.
On Monday, five US personnel and two contractors were injured in a rocket attack at the Al Asad Airbase in western Iraq. The invasive Pentagon military blamed Iran-aligned groups for the dangerous escalation.
US forces in Syria and Iraq have faced a spate of attacks since the start of the Israel-Hamas war last fall, with close to 170 attacks targeting both bases and military sites built on top of the occupied Omar Oil Field and ConocoPhillips Gas Plant.
Attacks dropped off radically in February in an uneasy truce, but ramped back up again in July. US defense chief Lloyd Austin said that the Pentagon has put measures in place to protect our troops.
And also make sure we’re in a good position to aid in the defense of Israel if called upon to do that. So you’ve seen us do a number of things to strengthen our force posture. Austin said.
The Intercept reported this week that the US maintains some 63 bases, garrisons and shared facilities in countries across the Middle East, and that at least 145 US military personnel and contractors have been killed or wounded in the region since October, 2023.
The fate of US forces in Iraq and Syria has been under debate since the brutal US assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad in January 2020, when he was on its way to participate in peace talks.
Donald Trump, who had admitted repeatedly in 2018 and 2019 that the USA had troops in Syria only for the oil, vowed in 2020 to wind down the US presence in Syria and Iraq before the end of his first term, but was met with stalling and obfuscation by his subordinates, who stonewalled a potential Syrian withdrawal until Trump was out of office.
Trump’s plans to draw down forces in Iraq were similarly scuppered, with his successors in the Biden administration formally ending the US ‘combat mission’ in Iraq in late 2021, but keeping the troops stationed there in a training and advisory’ role, despite demands by the Iraqi parliament that the forces be completely withdrawn.
Biden is known to have been an active proponent within the Obama administration of the CIA’s ‘Operation Timber Sycamore’ to provide arms, supplies and training to the thousands of jihadist militants who signed up to fight the Syrian government starting in 2012.
The covert operation was closed down by the Trump administration in 2017.
Syria has reported a major uptick of US military activity in its northeastern provinces in recent months, with the region home to the vast majority of the war-torn country’s oil-rich areas needed for reconstruction.
Damascus has repeatedly demanded that all foreign forces not explicitly invited into the country by Syria’s internationally recognized government to withdraw completely and immediately.
CIA director John Brennan speculating that the president might pursue vendettas against his intelligence officials, possibly for their failure to support him amid the corruption probe against the Biden family’s potentially illegal business dealings in Ukraine.
Sputnik / ABC Flash-Point News 2024.
USA is stealing the oil resources and at the same depriving Syrian from food and oil to keep the economy running?
Correct Anonymous -totally illegal -brakes all International Laws -as I said before the US Administration is just a bigger version of the Mafia -” do as we say –or else ” and “We will make you an offer you cant refuse” – they have never got by the “Cowboys & Indians” stage and look what happened to the Indians from tens of millions down to a few hundred thousand at the most -exploited-robbed-starved -killed .
I am in touch with US native citizens organizations and like Canada they are still exploited .
Us natives are a thorn in the eye of the oppressor, so they must be wiped out, just like Israel is wiping out Palestinians to ignore their basic rights.
Their women are exploited and forced into prostitution, while some men are offered jobs in far away excluded places and lured into alcohol abuse and smoking crack cocaine.
The invaders even almost killed all the Buffalo in order to take away their primary food source in these days.
Spot on I.N !!! – the (in) famous “Buffalo Bill ” was paid by the US government to travel in trains shooting buffalo,s to starve the Indian population –it worked –so much for this American “hero ” .
Sponsoring terrorists and plundering resources: that’s the job of the US troops in Syria.
On the upside the Yanks are not exactly in a very safe defensive position, to put it mildly. Also there is a clear recourse in the WTO respecting Syria recouping its losses to such perfidious larceny.
Plundering for the industrialists, and once those troops go back home, their jobs and that of their families are off-shored, the veterans will end up homeless and begging to feed themselves.
Check out the US Vets suicide reports – many vets have a conscious after doing their governments dirty work and your right American GI,s fight for US Big Business not for America.
There are more veteran soldiers dying from suicide at home than in the wars the fight for the corps.
When you come back from the wars what you have seen and heard and ordered to do never leaves you –sitting at home brooding builds up and the inadequate medical care caused by the government saving money where Vet groups had to fight to get assistance after one year –it took national publicity for them to extent the medical care over one year. I was in contact with those groups and voted for their cause. Its a national disgrace – clap and cheer them when they went to war –ignore them when they come back with physical or mental illness.… Read more »