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The United States has caused no casualties lately from its attack on an Iranian-linked weapons workshop in Syria, the Pentagon said Thursday.
Two American warplanes hit the site in Syria’s Deir Ezzor province the day before in an operation that US officials said was in response to attacks on the country’s troops in the Middle East.
“At this time, we do not assess that there have been casualties,” Sabrina Singh, the Pentagon’s deputy press secretary, told reporters.
The assessment contradicted a report released a day earlier by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which said the attack killed nine other people affiliated with Iranian-backed groups.
The US military also hit two facilities in Syria on October 26 that it said were used by Iran and affiliated organizations, and likewise assessed that those strikes did not cause casualties.
Singh said there have been a total of 46 strikes against U. S. forces in Iraq and Syria since Oct. 17, 4 after Wednesday’s strike aimed at deterring such actions.
The attacks left a total of 56 people wounded, he added.
The United States is striving to deter Iran and its proxies from turning fighting between Israel and Hamas into a regional war, but the repeated attacks and strikes in response risk a conflict between Washington and Tehran.
The increase in attacks on U. S. troops in recent weeks is related to the war between Israel and Hamas, which began when the Palestinian militant organization carried out a surprise cross-border attack from Gaza on Oct. 7 that Israeli officials say killed more than 1,400 people. .
The Israeli military responded with a relentless air, ground and naval attack on Gaza that, according to the territory’s Ministry of Health, killed more than 10,800 people.
There are roughly 2,500 American troops in Iraq and some 900 in Syria as part of efforts to prevent a resurgence of the Islamic State group.
The jihadists once occupied significant territory in both countries but were driven back by local forces subsidized by foreign airstrikes in a bloody standoff that lasted several years.
DD/JH