US military says targeted ‘Iranian-backed’ fighters in Syria for a second day

US Central Command (CENTCOM), which is responsible for US forces deployed in the Middle East, did not specify on Wednesday how many air strikes were conducted – or who the targets were – stating only that the Iranian-aligned “group’s weapons storage and logistics headquarters” were hit.

The unnamed fighters had fired rockets at the US Patrol Base Shaddadi, in northeast Syria, but inflicted no damage to the facility or injuries to US or “partner forces”, CENTCOM added.

On Tuesday, CENTCOM also announced it had carried out attacks against “Iranian backed groups” in Syria, hitting nine targets at two separate locations in the country over the previous 24-hour period.

“US Central Command, alongside our regional partners, will aggressively pursue any threat to US forces, allies, partners, and security in the region,” CENTCOM’s commander Michael Erik Kurilla said in a statement following the latest strikes.

An estimated 900 US soldiers are based in the eastern part of Syria – and 2,500 in neighbouring Iraq – as part of a longstanding operation that continues to focus on preventing a resurgence of Daesh group, which seized large areas of both Syria and Iraq in 2014 before being militarily defeated.

CENTCOM’s strikes on Monday reportedly killed four Syrian members of Iranian-backed armed groups and wounded 10 others, some of them severely, in the Al Mayadeen area of eastern Syria’s Deir Az Zor countryside, according to the United Kingdom-based monitoring group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

CENTCOM did not specify the locations of their separate attacks in Syria.

Then-US President Donald Trump ordered the withdrawal of all US forces from Syria in 2018 on the grounds that Daesh had been defeated.

The US military, however, later announced that a contingency force would remain in the country, where some see them as both a deterrent to Daesh as well as an attempt to limit neighbouring Iran’s spreading influence in Syria.