Washington: Syria was informed by the United States in advance of airstrikes against targets including Islamic State (IS) strongholds, but there was no strategic coordination with the Syrian government, a State Department spokeswoman said yesterday.
Although the United States said it gave no specifics on the attacks and did not request clearance from Damascus, it marked a rare display of interaction between Washington and envoys for Syrian President Bashar Al Assad.
“We warned Syria not to engage US aircraft,” said State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki in Washington. “We did not request the regime’s permission. We did not coordinate our actions with the Syrian government,” he said.
In a sign of how IS’s rise has blurred conflict lines, the Syrian government said Washington had informed it hours before the strikes in a letter from Secretary of State John Kerry sent through his Iraqi counterpart.
The United States led airstrikes against IS militants in Syria because Damascus has “shown it cannot and will not confront these safe havens,” the United States wrote to the United Nations in a letter yesterday. In the letter to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, US Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power said the strikes were necessary to eliminate the IS threat to Iraq, the United States and its allies.
She said the action was justified under Article 51 of the UN Charter, which covers the individual or collective right of states to self-defence against armed attack.
The United States and its Arab allies bombed Syria for the first time yesterday, killing scores of Islamic State fighters and members of a separate Al Qaeda-linked group, opening a new front against militants by joining Syria’s three-year-old civil war. US Central Command (CENTCOM) said Bahrain, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates participated in or supported the strikes against IS targets. Warplanes and ship-launched Tomahawk cruise missiles struck dozens of targets including fighters, training compounds, headquarters and command and control facilities, storage sites, a finance center, trucks and armed vehicles, CENTCOM said.
The Pentagon said the US Ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, had informed Syria’s envoy in advance but there had been no coordination and no communication between the two countries’ armed forces.
The Syrian foreign ministry refrained from criticizing the US-led action. State media reported that a senior Iraqi envoy briefed Assad on the next steps and the Syrian leader said he supported any international effort to fight terrorism.
Only a year ago Washington was on the verge of bombing the Syrian government over the use of chemical weapons, before Obama cancelled the strikes at the last minute. Tightly-controlled Syrian state TV interviewed an analyst who said the air strikes did not amount to an act of aggression because the government had been notified. “This does not mean we are part of the joint operations room, and we are not part of the alliance. But there is a common enemy,” said the analyst, Ali Al Ahmad.
Syria’s closest ally, Iran, responded cautiously. President Hassan Rowhani said in New York that without a UN mandate or a request from the government of the affected state, military strikes “don’t have any legal standing”. However, he neither condemned nor endorsed the action.
Residents of the city of Raqqa, Islamic State’s de facto capital in eastern Syria, said by telephone that people were fleeing for the countryside after the bombs fell overnight.
IS vowed revenge against the United States. “These attacks will be answered,” a fighter said by Skype from Syria, blaming Saudi Arabia’s ruling family for allowing the strikes to take place.
The Sunni fighters, who have proclaimed a caliphate ruling over all Muslims, shook the Middle East by sweeping through northern Iraq in June. They alarmed the West in recent weeks by killing two US journalists and a British aid worker, raising fears that they could attack Western countries.
PITCHED INTO CIVIL WAR
The action pitched Washington for the first time into the Syrian civil war, which began with “Arab Spring” democracy protests in 2011 but has descended into a sectarian conflict that has killed 200,000 people, displaced millions and drawn in proxy forces backed by countries across the region.
The Syrian military pressed its campaign against the rebels unabated yesterday, shelling and carrying out air strikes in the southern province of Deraa and the outskirts of Damascus, as well as Raqqa and Idlib provinces, the Observatory said. Rebel and loyalist forces fought in the northern city of Aleppo.
US forces have previously hit Islamic State targets in Iraq, where Washington supports the government, but had held back from a military engagement in Syria where Obama still calls for the downfall of Assad. Washington has said it would not coordinate action against Islamic State with Assad’s government.
IS State fighters, equipped with US weapons seized in Iraq, are among the most powerful opponents of Assad, a member of a Shia-derived sect. They are also battling rival Sunni groups in Syria, the Shia-led government of Iraq and Kurdish forces on both sides of the border. In recent days they have captured villages from Kurds near Syria’s Turkish border, sending nearly 140,000 refugees across the frontier since last week. The United Nations said it was preparing for up to 400,000 people to flee.
The Western-backed Syrian opposition and Syrian Kurdish groups, which are fighting both Assad and Islamic State, welcomed the air strikes and said they need more support.
“There is an exodus out of Raqqa as we speak,” a resident said by phone. “It started in the early hours of the day after the strikes. People are fleeing towards the countryside.”
The city’s two-storey main administrative building had been hit by four rockets, which were so precise that nearby buildings were not damaged, said the resident, named Abo Mohammed. He said hundreds of fighters, who had been visible in the streets controlling traffic and security, had now vanished.
The main Syrian Kurdish armed group said Islamic State fighters were redeploying from areas hit by the US strikes towards territory controlled by the Kurds.Agencies
