9/27/2023 0 Comments Us drone strike in syria![]() The Soviet-designed structure of earth and concrete stood 30 miles upstream from the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed capital, Raqqa, and whoever controlled the dam effectively controlled the city. Perhaps no single incident shows the brazen use of self-defense rules and the potentially devastating costs more than the strike on the Tabqa Dam.Īt the start of the war, the United States saw the dam as a key to victory. Rushed strikes on sites like schools, mosques and markets killed crowds of women and children, according to former service members, military documents obtained by The Times and reporting at sites of coalition airstrikes in Syria. That allowed it to quickly hit targets - including no-strike sites - that would have otherwise been off limits. Soon, the task force was justifying the vast majority of its airstrikes using emergency self-defense procedures intended to save troops in life-threatening situations, even when no troops were in danger. The task force’s solution to this problem too often was to set aside the rules intended to protect civilians, current and former military personnel said. The situation grew so desperate that authorities at dams upstream in Turkey cut water flow into Syria to buy time, and sworn enemies in the yearslong conflict - the Islamic State, the Syrian government, Syrian Defense Forces and the United States - called a rare emergency cease-fire so civilian engineers could race to avert a disaster. ![]() The reservoir quickly rose 50 feet and nearly spilled over the dam, which engineers said would have been catastrophic. military publicly claimed.Ĭritical equipment lay in ruins and the dam stopped functioning entirely. “Had they been allowed to do so, our assessments at the time predicted that they would have inflicted further suffering on the people of Syria.”īut the two former officials, who were directly involved in the air war at the time, and Syrian witnesses interviewed by The Times, said the situation was far more dire than the U.S. “The mission, and the strikes that enabled it, helped return control of the intact Tabqa Dam to the people of Northeast Syria and prevented ISIS from weaponizing it,” Captain Urban said. Noting that the dam did not collapse, he added, “That analysis has proved accurate.” Bill Urban, the chief spokesman for the command, said in the statement. “Analysis had confirmed that strikes on the towers attached to the dam were not considered likely to cause structural damage to the Tabqa Dam itself,” Capt. A spokesman said that the bombs hit only the towers attached to the dam, not the dam itself, and while top leaders had not been notified beforehand, limited strikes on the towers had been preapproved by the command. Central Command, which oversaw the air war in Syria, acknowledged dropping three 2,000-pound bombs, but denied targeting the dam or sidestepping procedures. In response to questions from The Times, U.S. If it had exploded, experts say, the whole dam might have failed. “Worst case, those munitions could have absolutely caused the dam to fail.”Īfter the strikes, dam workers stumbled on an ominous piece of good fortune: Five floors deep in the dam’s control tower, an American BLU-109 bunker-buster lay on its side, scorched but intact - a dud. “Using a 2,000-pound bomb against a restricted target like a dam is extremely difficult and should have never been done on the fly,” he said. Murray, a retired Air Force colonel, who planned airstrikes during air campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo. The revelation of Task Force 9’s role in the dam attack follows a pattern described by The New York Times: The unit routinely circumvented the rigorous airstrike approval process and hit Islamic State targets in Syria in a way that repeatedly put civilians at risk.Įven with careful planning, hitting a dam with such large bombs would likely have been seen by top leaders as unacceptably dangerous, said Scott F. involvement were based on “crazy reporting.” military’s “no-strike list” of protected civilian sites and the commander of the U.S. The Islamic State, the Syrian government and Russia blamed the United States, but the dam was on the U.S. The mighty flow of the Euphrates River suddenly had no way through, the reservoir began to rise, and local authorities used loudspeakers to warn people downstream to flee. A fire spread, and crucial equipment failed. Witnesses say one bomb punched down five floors. The explosions on March 26, 2017, knocked dam workers to the ground and everything went dark. The Tabqa Dam was a strategic linchpin and the Islamic State controlled it. ![]() Near the height of the war against the Islamic State in Syria, a sudden riot of explosions rocked the country’s largest dam, a towering, 18-story structure on the Euphrates River that held back a 25-mile-long reservoir above a valley where hundreds of thousands of people lived. ![]()
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