The leveling of nine buildings used by Iranian-supported militants in Syria last week yielded one casualty, but Pentagon officials are sidestepping a charge that the strike caused little damage.
The American strike in Syria was in response to two February militia attacks in Iraq that led to the death of an American military contractor and injuries to several service members and contractors. The Defense Department said Monday that a damage assessment of the Syria strike revealed that one militant was killed and two were injured.
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Told that militants have disputed the operational value assigned to the facility, Pentagon press secretary John Kirby stood firm on comments made Friday.
“This was really designed to do two things,” he said. “To remove that compound from their utilization of it as an entry control point from Syria into Iraq; and two, to send a very strong signal that we’re not going to tolerate attacks on our people and our Iraqi partners.”
Shortly after the Thursday attack, militants posted messages on social media indicating the facility was of little value, according to the Middle East Media Research Institute.
“The airstrike targeted an uninhabited structure (empty) near a site that belongs to one of the resistance factions on the borderline on the Syrian side, which led to the death of one martyr and some were lightly wounded,” said a post on the Sabereen News Telegram channel translated by MEMRI.
President Biden authorized the strike but has not discussed it publicly in any depth, even as some Democrats cried foul that Congress did not approve the strike. The White House said key members of Congress were briefed before and after the retaliatory attack.
The Pentagon has insisted the attack, a response to a Feb. 15 rocket attack on an Iraqi base housing American troops in Erbil and rockets that landed near the U.S. Embassy in the Green Zone in Baghdad Feb. 22, was “proportionate.”
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“We believe that this was a deliberate and proportionate attack,” Kirby said Friday. “A strike on infrastructure that we know was being utilized by the groups responsible for these recent attacks.”
