Pentagon: Eight US Troops Wounded in Syria Attack Last Week

The Pentagon said Tuesday that a total of eight US troops were wounded in a drone attack that hit a US base in northeast Syria on Friday.

Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said all eight troops were treated for smoke inhalation and traumatic brain injuries. “Three of those service members have returned to duty while the others remain under observation,” Ryder told reporters. “According to CENTCOM (US Central Command), none of the injuries are life-threatening.”

US officials first said on Saturday that US service members were wounded in the one-way drone attack on the Rumalyn Landing Zone but didn’t specify how many. The attack came the same week that four US troops and one American contractor were wounded when rockets hit the Ain al-Asad air base in western Iraq.

Iraqi Shia militias launched over 100 rocket and drone attacks on US bases from October 2023 to February of this year in response to US support for Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. After three US troops were killed in January at Tower 22, a secretive US base in Jordan, Iran and the Iraqi government pressured the militias to stop the attacks.

In recent weeks, attacks restarted, potentially because the US has not made any clear moves toward withdrawing from Iraq despite Washington and Baghdad starting talks on the future of the US military presence. Tensions are also soaring in the region as Iran is expected to launch a reprisal attack on Israel for the assassination of Hamas’s political chief in Tehran.

Harrison Mann, a former US Army major who resigned from the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency in May due to US support for the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, said in an op-ed published by The Guardian on Tuesday that US troops in Iraq and Syria were not being protected.

Mann said in the op-ed that he and his colleagues at the Pentagon were not “saddened but not surprised” when three US troops were killed at Tower 22. “As the close calls and injuries mounted, we came to a stunning realization: there was no real plan to protect US troops beyond leaving them in their small, isolated bases while local militants, emboldened and agitated by US support for Israel’s brutal war in Gaza, used them for target practice,” he wrote.