Nearly two weeks after Iran and Saudi Arabia restored diplomatic relations in a landmark China-brokered deal, Iran-backed terrorist groups staged coordinated attacks on U.S. troops stationed in Syria.
An American contractor was killed and at least six U.S. soldiers were reported injured in multiple drone and rocket strikes on U.S. basses by Syrian terrorist groups linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
ABC News reported the Iran-backed terrorist strikes:
A U.S. official told ABC News that there were two new attacks late Friday on two U.S. facilities in Deir ez-Zor Province in eastern Syria after another one earlier in the day and a drone attack on Thursday that prompted retaliatory U.S. airstrikes that targeted Iranian-backed militias believed responsible.Both attacks late Friday happened about the same time, the official said. One involved three drones targeting one facility and the other involved five rockets fired at a separate facility, according to the official, who said one American service member was wounded and was in stable condition.The official said that two of the three drones that targeted one U.S. facility were shot down, but one drone made it through. There were no injuries in that attack.The official said that five rockets were fired at another U.S. facility where the American service member was wounded. That individual is in stable condition, the official said, and that a damage assessment of the facility was still underway.
The U.S. responded with counter-strikes on Iran-affiliated terrorist targets. “The US has carried out air strikes against Iran-linked groups in eastern Syria after a drone attack killed a US contractor,” the BBC reported Saturday, citing U.S. military sources. “Fourteen pro-Iran fighters were killed, according to a monitoring group,” the broadcaster confirmed.
The attacks on the U.S. bases comes in the backdrop of a Russian-backed effort to restore diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Syria. Saudi Arabia and its allied Arab Gulf countries backed Syrian rebels in a decade-long civil war. Syria’s Bashar al-Assad’s regime appears to have prevailed in the conflict with military support from Russia and Iran.
The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday:
Saudi Arabia and Syria are nearing an agreement to restore diplomatic ties after negotiations mediated by Russia, according to Saudi and Syrian officials familiar with the discussions, as the geopolitics of the Middle East shift.Talks were continuing after rounds of discussions in Moscow and Riyadh in recent weeks, the officials said. If a deal is reached, it would mark an important step to reintegrating Syria and its leader Bashar al-Assad into the broader region after a brutal civil war.
This weeks Iranian-backed terror strikes on U.S. troops in the Middle East is not an isolated incident. Since President Joe Biden took office, Tehran has carried out several such attacks. “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,” the Associated Press noted Saturday.
All this took place while the Biden administration was busy dismantling President Donald Trump’s policy of Maximum Pressure on Tehran. The Biden White House eased Trump-era sanctions on the regime in a failed and desperate bid to restore the 2015 Obama-Kerry nuclear deal.
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