Shock and Awe: First Strikes in Syria
WES BRYANT
WITH REMARKS FROM DANA PITTARD
Backtrack to Mid-September 2014
I remember vividly the night we began the shock and awe campaign into Syria. We were deep into our airstrike campaign in Iraq. At the BIAP Strike Cell, most of our air assets had been taken from us for the night in order to cover down on the planned barrage of Syria strikes.1
Our strike cell was essentially shut down for the night for lack of aircraft—but we’d known for a while it was coming. The BIAP Strike Cell hadn’t taken part in the targeting for the initial airstrike campaign in Syria—higher headquarters and another special operations task force had accomplished all the targeting. They were going to be controlling all the strikes, and they needed all the air assets in theatre to do it.
With not much else to do, we flipped on one of the TVs in the strike cell and watched the news back home as it reported, almost in real-time, on the first attacks in Syria. At the same time, we monitored our air traffic display that showed us all the aircraft activity over the skies of Iraq and Syria. Then we programed our drone feeds to watch the sensors of the drones that were soaking the first targets in Syria to be hit within just a few hours.
Later that evening, we watched on our air traffic display as dozens of coalition aircraft pushed toward the border of Iraq and Syria to prosecute the first strikes in Syria ever by the United States.2 It was reminiscent of the bombing hordes of World War II. None of us had witnessed such a huge aerial offensive in all our years of war up to that point. It was an awesome and surreal sight to see—even on an air traffic feed.
As those first strikes happened, we watched live via our drone feeds.
One of the first targets was an extremely large building reminiscent of the stately brick or stone buildings you see on fancy college campuses. It was sitting by itself on a hilltop and was at least four stories high and around 200 meters long. It sat at the end of a winding road that led up to the crest of the small hill it sat on. It had a huge wraparound parking lot where a single car was parked. We’d been watching the building for hours before the strike, and we’d seen absolutely no activity at or around the building.
Soon, a flight of American F-22 Raptor fighter jets carried out the first strikes on the building, dropping a handful of 500-pound bombs. But the bombs did relatively little damage to the giant building. We noticed immediately that there was no post-strike activity as we would typically see with a strike on an occupied, multi-story structure. If there had been any ISIS members inside, we should have seen a lot of squirters from the building—ISIS fighters running for their lives after those first unsuccessful bombing runs.
Later that night, more strike assets were sent in to wipe out the building, but in the meantime we watched as the drone continued to observe the damaged building and the hilltop it sat on. Within twenty minutes or so after those first strikes, a vehicle drove up to the compound. A man exited and walked a few feet toward the collapsed entrance to the building. He stood staring toward it for some time. He must have been in shock at what he was looking at, wondering how it had happened.
After a few moments, the man slowly walked toward what had once been the large front entrance of the building, appearing as if he were trying to figure out if he could get inside. Shortly after, he just gave up any attempt at whatever he was doing—the front of the building was in near-ruins after all. He seemed to be a bit scared as he quickly made his way back to his car and drove off back down the hill.
Later that night after another barrage of strikes toppled the building completely, portions of that first strike were shown on U.S. news back home. The news reported the strikes as the successful destruction of an “ISIS command center in Syria.” U.S. military spokespeople touted it as a great coalition success.
We found that funny in the strike cell, as we watched the news reporting on a strike that we’d observed in real-time. We knew, most likely, that ISIS had abandoned the building well before the strike—if it was ever even occupied at all. We all had a good laugh at the hype. We knew it was definitely a dry target—a target that maybe at one point was valid but wasn’t by the time it was hit.
Maybe we’d hit that building for the psychological effect against ISIS, or to keep them from using the facility in the future? We really didn’t know what the justification was, but both scenarios would have been perfectly valid.
Still, from our vantage point there was no discernable reason to feed that particular footage to the news. There were plenty of other strikes that same night that would have been better to feed to news outlets in my opinion—strikes where it was extremely evident that we’d killed actively maneuvering ISIS fighters.
The only reason we could think of was that any footage of people actually being killed might be deemed too much for American television. In that case, a benign strike on an unoccupied building would have been the choice footage to distribute to the media. We were puzzled by it, still.
But we were more puzzled at our sudden massive military involvement in Syria. With the Syrian regime in the midst of a civil war, and ISIS having infiltrated the eastern portion of the country, many of us wondered how and why our government was simply entering a sovereign nation and striking the hell out of it with zero permission from its government?3
What would the long-term outcome of the U.S. decision to initiate a bombing campaign against ISIS in Syria, without the Assad regime’s consent, be? And what would our evolving mission become as a result?
Remarks from Dana Pittard
We must remember that virtually all wars are fought for some type of political end state. The image of four Arab nations’ air forces—Saudi Arabia, Jordan, UAE, and Qatar—striking ISIS in Syria along with the United States was huge. It went way beyond the immediate tactical value of the targets. It demonstrated that the coalition, including Sunni Arab nations fighting the largely Sunni-led ISIS, were showing the world that the Middle East was united in stopping ISIS.
That said, I still felt strongly we should have conducted some level of coordination with the Syrian military. I understood why we could not do it openly. If we had any official coordination with the Syrian military, we would have lost the support of the Sunni Arab nations in the region who were all vehemently against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and wanted to eliminate him and his regime. At that time, we needed the support of the Sunni Arab nations against ISIS. However, we actually did assist at least one of the Syrian regime forces fighting ISIS in eastern Syria.
There was a Syrian Army commander of a large military base of around 6,000 Syrian military personnel near the Syrian town of Deir el-Zour along the Euphrates River. His name was Major General Issam Zaher al-Deen. General Issam had two nicknames within the Syrian Army: “The Bone Cutter” and “The Lion of the Republican Guard.”
Earlier that year, ISIS had surrounded Deir el-Zour and attempted to assault and overrun his base numerous times. General Issam’s forces constantly counterattacked and successfully defended Deir el-Zour from multiple pounding ISIS attacks. His command was literally alone in a ferocious fight against ISIS.
We grudgingly admired General Issam’s grit and determination from afar. We realized that, if Deir el-Zour fell, it would allow ISIS freedom of movement along the Euphrates River Valley—from the ISIS capital of Ar Raqqa all the way south and east into western Iraq. We could not let that happen.
During the planning for the first strikes in Syria, we quietly offered our help to General Issam through some of our coalition contacts, and we were able to strike some targets that he provided us intelligence on. The Lion of the Republican Guard was very grateful for our assistance. General Issam and his soldiers were eventually able to defeat the ISIS fighters in the Deir el-Zour area.
1 Barbara Starr, “U.S. ready to strike ISIS in Syria, military officials say,” CNN, September 18, 2014, accessed April 24, 2018, http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/18/politics/us-ready-to-strike-isis-in-syria/index.html.
2 Craig Whitlock, “U.S. Begins airstrikes against Islamic State in Syria,” The Washington Post, September 23, 2014, accessed April 24, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-begins-airstrikes-against-islamic-state-in-syria/2014/09/22/8b677e26-42b3-11e4-b437-1a7368204804_story.html?utm_term=.08f3f3e4d43b.
3 Anne Gearan, “U.S. rules out coordinating with Assad on airstrikes against Islamists in Syria,” The Washington Post, August 26, 2014, accessed April 24, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-rules-out-coordinating-with-assad-on-airstrikes-against-islamists-in-syria/2014/08/26/cda02e0e-2d2e-11e4-9b98-848790384093_story.html?utm_term=.ecd36207e79f.