A kamikaze drone attack last Thursday killed a U.S. contractor in Syria, setting off a series of tit-for-tat airstrikes between U.S. and Iranian proxy forces.
According to a news release from the Department of Defense, the Iranian-made drone targeted a military base belonging to the U.S. and the Kurdish-Syrian Democratic Forces in northeast Syria on the afternoon of March 23.
Striking a maintenance facility, one contractor was pronounced dead, two service members were treated for injuries on site, and four other individuals — three service members and one contractor — were transported to hospitals in Iraq for emergency medical treatment.
U.S. forces responded by attacking the militant groups believed to be behind the drone strike, per Associated Press News.
“At the direction of President Biden, I authorized U.S. Central Command forces to conduct precision airstrikes tonight in eastern Syria against facilities used by groups affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC),” Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin said in the news release.
IRGC was established as defenders of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979 and has since supported ideologically aligned militant groups like the Islamic State in Syria, as well as in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine.
The retaliatory airstrikes were conducted by F-15 fighter jets from Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, per AP News. They struck targets around Deir ez-Zor, killing four people and wounding several others, as claimed by the activist group Deir ez-Zor 24.
More drone attacks against U.S. facilities in Deir ez-Zor Province were waged by Iranian-backed groups late on Friday in response, per ABC News. One U.S. service member was wounded.
One of the rockets missed its intended target and struck a civilian house, “causing significant damage and causing minor injuries to two women and two children,” as a news release from U.S. Central Command explained on March 24.
These back-and-forth attacks come on the heels of recent significant progress in deescalating tensions in the region.
As previously reported by The Dallas Express, in peace talks brokered by China on March 10, both Iran and Saudi Arabia agreed to restore ties and reopen embassies within the next two months. This detente is expected to have wide-ranging implications in the region, especially in minimizing animosity fueled by the Sunni-Shiite sectarian divide.
Yet it was Qatar that stepped in to calm the situation between the U.S. and Iranian-backed groups, per AP News. The foreign minister of Qatar, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, reportedly put in calls to both Jake Sullivan, the U.S. national security advisor, and Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, the Iranian foreign minister.
Nonetheless, tensions between the U.S. and Iran still risk coming to a head in Syria, where approximately 900 U.S. troops have been stationed to support Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces against the Islamic State.
“The United States does not, does not seek conflict with Iran,” President Joe Biden said during a state visit to Canada, per AP News. But he warned that military forces will “act forcefully to protect our people. That’s exactly what happened [Friday] night.”
Similarly, Gen. Michael “Erik” Kurilla of U.S. Central Command issued a strong warning that the U.S. “will always take all necessary measures to defend our people and will always respond at a time and place of our choosing. We are postured for scalable options in the face of any additional Iranian attacks,” per ABC News.
As Kurilla claimed to the House Armed Services Committee during a hearing on March 23, there have been 78 similar attacks on U.S. forces by Iran-backed groups since the start of 2021.