The Pentagon has said several US troops suffered injuries during last week’s attacks in Syria, part of which they are occupying against international law, violating the Arab country’s sovereignty.
Pentagon spokesman Brigadier General Patrick Ryder said on Thursday four service members suffered traumatic brain injuries near the Syrian city of Hasaka during a drone attack on March 23, and two others suffered injuries at mission support site Green Village during an attack on March 24.
“All personnel in the vicinity of a blast are screened for traumatic brain injury. So these additional injuries were identified during post-attack medical screenings,” Ryder told a news briefing.
The Pentagon’s disclosure further raises the human toll among American occupation forces from strikes and counter-strikes in Syria last week to a total of 12 US troops injured. The attacks also killed a US mercenary and injured another.
As a matter of policy, the US military does not openly acknowledge when it suffers casualties in the occupied territories due to retaliatory attacks by resistance fighters. It rather uses the term “brain injuries” for fallen soldiers, according to local officials.
The officials say the term “brain injuries” reflects the number of dead, which the US hesitates to formally announce.
Last week, the US military carried out multiple air strikes in the eastern parts of the Arab country.
Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin said the strikes in Syria against the positions of resistance fighters were carried out at the direction of Biden and targeted facilities used by groups affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps.
However, local sources pointed out that the target was not an Iran-aligned military post as the US military claimed, but rather a rural development center and a grain center in Hrabash neighborhood, near Dayr al-Zawr military airport. No Iranian was killed in the act of aggression.
American soldiers have occupied parts of Syria intermittently for nearly a decade, many embedded with Kurdish militias in Syria’s oil-rich northeast. The government in Damascus has repeatedly urged the US to end its military presence, insisting the deployments are illegal under international law, and has accused US forces of stealing vast quantities of oil, wheat and other resources and smuggling them out of the country.
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