U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria, who are deployed there to contribute to the campaign to prevent an ISIS resurgence, have come under attack by Iranian-backed proxies 55 times in the last month.
Since Oct. 17, U.S. forces in Iraq have been attacked 27 times, while U.S. troops in Syria have come under attack 28 times, deputy Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said on Tuesday. In those attacks, 59 U.S. troops have been injured, all of whom have since returned to duty, though nearly half were evaluated for traumatic head injuries. A majority of the injuries occurred during attacks on Oct. 17-18 that began this new chapter of heightened tension.
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U.S. forces have responded to these attacks against them with three iterations of airstrikes targeting facilities in Syria. Most recently, U.S. troops targeted a training facility and a safe house near the cities of Abu Kamal and Mayadin last Sunday.
"U.S. military forces conducted precision strikes today on facilities in eastern Syria used by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Iran-affiliated groups in response to continued attacks against U.S. personnel in Iraq and Syria," Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said in a statement on Sunday evening.
The U.S. military also conducted airstrikes against a weapons storage facility and an ammunition storage area in Syria on Oct. 26 and conducted subsequent airstrikes against a weapons storage facility on Nov. 8. Given the attacks have continued since Sunday's strike, the latest U.S. strikes have seemingly also not served as a deterrent strong enough to prevent additional attacks against U.S. forces.
"I think as you've seen, we've taken action," Singh added. "We've hit weapons storage facilities, and it's important to remember the facilities that we hit are now destroyed. These groups cannot go back to these facilities and take weapons out because they're gone. So we feel that we are being very precise with our targeting and ensuring that we can inflict the most damage to these groups and their capabilities."
The intent of the U.S. strikes, she argued, was to stop the attacks on U.S. forces.
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Iran backs both Hamas, the terrorist organization based in Gaza that carried out the worst terrorist attack in Israeli history on Oct. 7, as well as the more sophisticated terrorist organization, Hezbollah, in Lebanon, to Israel's north, and the groups targeting U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria.
Austin has surged troops and military power to the Middle East since Hamas carried out the terrorist attack to deter other adversaries of Israel, like Iran, from expanding the Israel-Hamas conflict into a regional one.