Biden says U.S. will ‘forcefully’ protect personnel in Syria after drone kills U.S. contractor

OTTAWA —  President Biden said Friday that the U.S. would respond “forcefully” to protect its personnel after U.S. forces retaliated with airstrikes on sites in Syria used by groups affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard following an attack Thursday by a suspected Iranian-made drone that killed a U.S. contractor and wounded six other Americans in northeast Syria.

“The United States does not, does not seek conflict with Iran,” Biden said in Ottawa, where he is on a state visit. But he said Iran and its proxies should be prepared for the U.S. “to act forcefully to protect our people. That’s exactly what happened last night.” Activists said the U.S. bombing killed at least four people.

Though it’s not the first time the U.S. and Iran have traded strikes in Syria, the attack and the U.S. response threaten to upend recent efforts to de-escalate tensions across the wider Middle East, where rival powers have recently made steps toward detente after years of turmoil.

According to U.S. officials, two simultaneous attacks were launched at U.S. forces in Syria on Friday. Officials said that based on preliminary information, there was a rocket attack at a Conoco gas plant that has a base housing U.S. troops, and one U.S. service member was injured and is in stable condition. At about the same time, several drones were launched at Green Village, where U.S. troops are also based. One official said that all but one of the drones was shot down, and there were no U.S. injuries there. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss military operations.

On Friday night, two Syrian opposition activist groups reported a new wave of airstrikes on eastern Syria that hit positions of Iran-backed militias.

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III said in a statement that the American intelligence community had determined the drone in Thursday’s attack was of Iranian origin, but offered no other immediate evidence to support the claim. The drone hit a coalition base in the northeast Syrian city of Hasakah. The wounded included five American service members and a U.S. contractor.

Austin said the strikes were a response to the drone attack “as well as a series of recent attacks against coalition forces in Syria” by groups affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard.

Biden, speaking during a news conference with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, expressed his “deepest condolences” to the family of the American killed and well wishes for the injured.

Iran relies on a network of proxy forces through the Mideast to counter the U.S. and Israel, its regional archenemy. The U.S. has had forces in northeast Syria since 2015, when they deployed as part of the fight against Islamic State, and maintains some 900 troops there, working with Kurdish-led forces that control about a third of Syria.

The U.S. airstrikes hit targets in three towns in eastern Syria, activists said. Overnight, videos on social media purported to show explosions in Syria’s Dair Alzour, a strategic province that borders Iraq and contains oil fields. Iran-backed militia groups and Syrian forces control the area, which also has seen suspected airstrikes by Israel in recent months allegedly targeting Iranian supply routes.

According to a defense official, the U.S. counter-strikes were conducted by F-15 fighter jets flying out of Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss military operations.

According to a U.S. official, the U.S. F-15s struck three locations, all in the vicinity of Dair Alzour.

The activist group Deir Ezzor 24, which covers news in Dair Alzour province, said the American strikes killed four people and wounded a number of others, including Iraqis.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition war monitor based in the U.K., put the death toll from U.S. strikes at 11 Iranian-backed fighters — six at an arms depot in the Harabesh neighborhood in Dair Alzour and five others at military posts near the towns of Mayadeen and Bukamal.

Rami Abdurrahman, who heads the observatory, said three rockets were fired earlier Friday at Omar oil field in Dair Alzour, which houses U.S. troops, in an apparent retaliation for the American strikes.

An official with an Iran-backed group in Iraq said the strikes on eastern Syria early Friday killed seven Iranians. The official spoke on condition of anonymity in line with regulations.

The Associated Press could not immediately independently confirm the activist reports. Iran and Syria did not immediately acknowledge the strikes, nor did their officials at the United Nations in New York respond to requests for comment from the AP.

Iran’s paramilitary Islamic Revolutionary Guard, which answers only to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been suspected of carrying out attacks with bomb-carrying drones across the wider Middle East.

The exchange of strikes came as Saudi Arabia and Iran have been working toward reopening embassies in each other’s capitals. The kingdom also acknowledged efforts to reopen its embassy in Syria, whose president, Bashar Assad, has been backed by Iran in his country’s long civil war.

U.S. Army Gen. Michael “Erik” Kurilla, the head of the American military’s Central Command, warned that U.S. forces could carry out additional strikes if needed. “We are postured for scalable options in the face of any additional Iranian attacks,” Kurilla said in a statement.

Addressing the U.S. House Armed Services Committee on Thursday, Kurilla warned lawmakers that the “Iran of today is exponentially more militarily capable than it was even five years ago.” He pointed to Iran’s arsenal of ballistic missiles and bomb-carrying drones.

“What Iran does to hide its hand is they use Iranian proxies,” Kurilla said.

According to officials, Iran has launched 80 attacks against U.S. forces and locations in Iraq and Syria since January 2021. The vast majority of those have been in Syria.

Diplomacy to de-escalate the crisis appeared to begin immediately. The foreign minister of Qatar spoke by phone with U.S. national security advisor Jake Sullivan as well as Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian, the Qatari state news agency report. Qatar has been an interlocutor between Iran and the U.S. recently amid tensions over Tehran’s nuclear program.

Austin said he authorized the retaliatory strikes at the direction of Biden.

“As President Biden has made clear, we will take all necessary measures to defend our people and will always respond at a time and place of our choosing,” Austin said. “No group will strike our troops with impunity.”

The U.S. under Biden has struck Syria previously over tensions with Iran. The president ordered attacks on Syria in February and June of 2021 and in August 2022.

Dareen Khalifa, a senior Syria analyst with the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, said that while Thursday’s exchange of strikes came at a sensitive political moment because of the “overall deterioration of U.S.-Iran relations and the stalling of the nuclear talks,” she does not expect a significant escalation.

“These tit-for-tat strikes have been ongoing for a long time,” Khalifa said, although she noted that they usually do not result in casualties.

While “the risk of an escalatory cycle is there,” she said, “I think the Biden administration won’t be eager to escalate in Syria now and will instead have a relatively measured response.”

Since the U.S. drone strike that killed Revolutionary Guard Maj. Gen. Qassem Suleimani in 2020, Iran has sought “to make life difficult for U.S. forces stationed east of the Euphrates,” said Hamidreza Azizi, an expert with the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.

“Iran increased its support for local proxies in [Dair Alzour] while trying to ally with the tribal forces in the area,” Azizi wrote in a recent analysis. “Due to the geographical proximity, Iraqi groups also intensified their activities in the border strip with Syria and in the [Dair Alzour] province.”

The strikes come during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

Syria’s war began with the 2011 Arab Spring protests that roiled the Middle East and toppled governments in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen. It evolved into a regional proxy conflict in which Russia and Iran have backed Assad. The United Nations estimates that more than 300,000 civilians have been killed in the war. Those figures do not include soldiers and insurgents killed in the conflict; their numbers are believed to be in the tens of thousands.