Michael R. Gordon, Lara Seligman and Jared Malsin
The U.S. military began a large-scale attack against Islamic State targets in Syria as the Trump administration retaliated for the death of three Americans last week.
A U.S. military official said Friday that more than 70 targets were being struck by U.S. F-15E and A-10 warplanes, Apache attack helicopters and Himars rockets.
The operation is being dubbed "Hawkeye Strike" in honor of the Iowa National Guard soldiers who were killed and wounded in an ambush the Trump administration has blamed on ISIS.
The gunman that ambushed the Americans was killed in the attack. But President Trump on Sunday vowed to take military action against the group. The strikes were the biggest American attack against ISIS in Syria since the fall of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
"Because of ISIS's vicious killing of brave American Patriots in Syria, whose beautiful souls I welcomed home to American soil earlier this week in a very dignified ceremony, I am hereby announcing that the United States is inflicting very serious retaliation, just as I promised, on the murderous terrorists responsible, President Trump said in post on Truth Social.
Jordan's F-16s were also involved in the operation, according to a senior U.S. official. A spokeswoman for the Jordanian Embassy in Washington had no immediate comment.
The strikes were carried out in central Syria and targeted ISIS infrastructure and weapons sites, U.S. officials said.
Even before the strike, the U.S. had moved to step up the pressure against the militants. Earlier this week, the U.S. and its regional partners carried out a series of raids in Iraq and Syria that led to the death of three militants and the detention of 20 more. Those operations, a U.S. military official said, yielded intelligence that facilitated the Friday strikes.
The Dec. 13 attack took place at a fortified facility of the Internal Security Command, Syria's main domestic security force, near Palmyra. Two soldiers were killed and three others were wounded, a rare lethal assault against U.S. personnel in the country. A U.S. civilian working as an interpreter was also killed. A Syrian officer was killed and two others injured, according to Syria's Interior Ministry.
The ambush was widely seen as an effort to disrupt the growing cooperation on counterterrorism between the Trump administration and Syria's new President Ahmed al-Sharaa.
Syrian authorities last week blamed the ambush on a member of Syria's security forces who they said was set to be fired for holding extremist views.
The attack was the first major test of a new American security partnership with the government of Sharaa, a former rebel leader who led the overthrow of Assad last year.
Sharaa, himself a former jihadist who rejected ties with Al-Qaeda nearly a decade ago, is under pressure to remove hard-liners among the rebel coalition that brought him to power and who now make up a large part of Syria's new military.
Syria's new government joined the global U.S.-led coalition against Islamic state in November coinciding with a visit by Sharaa to the White House that cemented ties with the Trump administration.
Trump signed Congressional legislation this week that removes a debilitating sanctions law on Syria, the Caesar Act, that had been imposed to punish Assad's regime for war crimes, completing an important goal of Trump's push to ease Syria's path to stability after the fall of Assad.
A spokesman for the Syrian interior ministry said the government is evaluating thousands of Syrian security members to get rid of possible extremists.
The Islamic State group, which seized a large portion of Iraq and Syria in 2014, was pushed out of its territory after a campaign by Syrian and Iraqi forces backed by American special operations forces and airstrikes. The group persists as an insurgent group.
A report in June from the Pentagon's Inspector General, citing the U.S. military coalition operating on the ground, said Islamic State aims to destabilize the new Syrian government.
Islamic State claimed a separate attack on Sunday that killed four Syrian members of the Syrian government security forces in northwest Syria on Sunday, part of what military analysts say is a concerted attempt to disrupt the new partnership with Washington.
As part of its ongoing mission against Islamic State, the U.S. has about 1,000 troops in northeast Syria, where they work for the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, and at al-Tanf Garrison in the southeastern part of the country.
Adm. Brad Cooper, the head of the U.S. Central Command, visited that garrison on Friday to meet with the unit that lost soldiers last week and talked about the U.S. retaliation.
"This shows that ISIS is still active in central Syria," said Andrew Tabler, a Syria expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who served in the first Trump administration. "The U.S., the Sharaa government and the Syrian Democratic Forces are going to be fighting against ISIS for some time."
Syria's state-affiliated Al-Akhbar news channel said the sound of explosions could be heard in the countryside near the city of Deir Ezzour, in eastern Syria. The area is at the heart of the region where Syrian and American forces battled Islamic State militants for years.
The Syrian foreign ministry in a statement posted moments after the U.S. strikes said last weekend's attack "underscores the urgent necessity of strengthening international cooperation to combat terrorism in all its forms."
The statement said Damascus is committed to ensuring that Islamic State "has no safe havens on Syrian territory, and will continue to intensify military operations against it wherever it poses a threat."
Write to Michael R. Gordon at michael.gordon@wsj.com, Lara Seligman at lara.seligman@wsj.com and Jared Malsin at jared.malsin@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
December 19, 2025 18:36 ET (23:36 GMT)
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