The U.S. military for weeks has been conducting “direct action” drone strikes on Islamic State operatives in Syria who were seeking to organize terrorist attacks on American targets, according to a knowledgeable U.S. official.
The strikes have mainly hit targets in the Islamic State’s capital of Raqqa, in northeast Syria. In many cases, the attacks were ordered after U.S. intelligence learned that Islamic State facilitators there were contacting “lone wolf” volunteers inside the U.S, or others who might be recruited to stage terrorist attacks similar to last Friday’s assaults in Paris.
‘There were networks of folks in Raqqa endeavoring to conduct similar attacks in the U.S. We killed most of them,” the official said. But he cautioned that despite these successes, the U.S. military still faces serious obstacles in collecting information about Islamic State operations. “Our ability to ‘see’ and hear them is severely restricted by the readily available encryption they use,” the official said.
The strikes were mounted by U.S. Special Operations forces, directed by the Pentagon and the White House. By one estimate, these secret operations have killed more than 50 Islamic State operatives who were believed to be attempting to organize attacks against U.S. targets around the world, including inside the U.S.
These “direct action” operations may be stepped up when the Pentagon completes its plan to deploy up to 50 Special Forces troops into Syria, to work with Arab and Kurdish forces there. With operatives on the ground, the official said, the U.S. will be able to partner with local fighters — allowing better targeted direct-action strikes and also maneuver warfare against the caliphate’s capital.
Knowledgeable officials say that U.S. operations against Islamic State targets in Syria and Iraq use unmanned aerial vehicles that, compared to earlier generations, are harder to detect and more precise.
washingtonpost.com
