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US forces also launched strikes to “disrupt imminent attack” against US and Western interests by “seasoned al Qaeda veterans” who had established a safe haven in Syria, it said, apparently referring to attacks against a separate group.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the war in Syria, said at least 20 Islamic State fighters were killed in strikes that hit at least 50 targets in Raqqa and Deir al-Zor provinces in Syria’s east.
It said strikes had also targeted the Nusra Front, in the northern provinces of Aleppo and Idlib, killing at least 30 fighters and eight civilians. The Nusra Front is al Qaeda’s official Syrian wing and Islamic State’s rival.
The air attacks fulfil President Barack Obama’s pledge to strike in Syria against Islamic State, a Sunni Muslim group that has seized swathes of Syria and Iraq, imposing a mediaeval interpretation of Islam, slaughtering prisoners and ordering Shi’ites and non-Muslims to convert or die.
Islamic State vowed revenge.
“These attacks will be answered,” an Islamic State fighter told Reuters by Skype from Syria, blaming the “sons of Saloul” – a derogatory term for Saudi Arabia’s ruling family – for allowing the strikes to take place.
The Sunni fighters, who have proclaimed a caliphate ruling over all Muslims, alarmed the Middle East by sweeping through northern Iraq in June. They shocked the West in recent weeks by beheading two US journalists and a British aid worker, raising fears that they could attack Western countries.
The strikes took place hours before Obama goes to New York for the UN General Assembly where he will try to rally more nations behind his drive to aggressively take on Islamic State.
The action pitches Washington for the first time into the three-year-old Syrian civil war, which has killed 200,000 people and displaced millions. 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 the United States opposes President Bashar al-Assad. The Syrian government said the United States had informed it hours before the strikes that Islamic State targets would be hit in Raqqa, 400 km northeast of Damascus. “The Foreign Minister received a letter from his American counterpart via the Iraqi Foreign Minister, in which he informed him that the United States and some of its allies would target (Islamic State) in Syria,” the Syrian Foreign Ministry said. “That was hours before the raids started.” A Ministry statement read on state television said Syria would continue to attack Islamic State in Raqqa and Deir al-Zor areas of eastern and northern Syria - and coordination with Iraq was continuing “at the highest level”.
The United States has previously stressed it would not coordinate with Assad’s Government. Obama’s position has long been that Assad must leave power, particularly after he was accused of using chemical weapons against his own people last year.
Islamic State’s Sunni fighters, now equipped with US weapons seized during their advance in Iraq, are among the most powerful opponents of Assad, a member of a Shi’ite-derived sect. They are also battling against rival Sunni groups in Syria, against the Shi’ite-led Government of Iraq and against Kurdish forces on both sides of the border.
Washington is determined to defeat them without helping Assad, a policy that requires deft diplomacy in a war in which nearly all the region’s countries have a stake.
The Western-backed Syrian opposition, which is fighting against both Assad and Islamic State, welcomed the air strikes which it said would help defeat Assad.
The targets included Raqqa city, the main headquarters in Syria of Islamic State fighters who have proclaimed a caliphate stretching from Aleppo province in Western Syria through the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys to the outskirts of Baghdad.
Photographs taken in Raqqa showed wreckage of what the Islamic State fighter said was a drone that had been shot down. Pieces of the wreckage, including what appeared to be part of a propellor, were shown loaded into the back of a van.
Jordan, apparently confirming its participation, said its air force had bombed “a number of targets that belong to some terrorist groups that sought to commit terrorist acts inside Jordan,” although it did not specify any location.
Israel said it had shot down a Syrian aircraft over air space it controls in the Golan Heights, which Syria confirmed. It was not immediately clear whether the incident was related to the US action.
