U.S. releases video of strikes on Islamic State targets in Syria. Video shows U.S.-led airstrikes in Syria against targets linked to Islamic State fighters. 'Strikes were very successful,' Pentagon spokesman says 9/23/2014. Director of Operations Lt. Gen. William Mayville holds a press briefing on U.S. airstrikes in the Mideast. US Pentagon statement on air strikes: Pentagon briefing following a night of air strikes on Islamic State militants in Syria. Pentagon: F-22s used in combat for first time in Syria (RT) This week’s strike against Islamic State militants in Syria by the United States marked the first time that the Pentagon has deployed its F-22 Raptor jets into combat, the Defense Department acknowledged on Tuesday. Lt. Gen. William Mayville, the director of ops for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged during a Department of Defense briefing on Tuesday morning that the strikes launched by the US hours earlier were the first ever to involve F-22s — a fifth-generation aircraft that’s capable of dropping precisions bombs on targets from 15 miles away. “What we were looking at were the effects we wanted to see on the target areas and what platforms in the region would be best suited to do that,” Mayville told reporters at the Pentagon. “We had a large menu of targets to strike from and we chose from there. Really it’s less the platform then the effects we seek.” The fighter jets have previously been deployed to Asia and the Middle East, the Wall Street Journal acknowledged on Tuesday, but have until now not been relegated with combat duties. The Pentagon had invested roughly $77.4 billion on the fleet of Raptors as of 2012 but, as RT has reported in the past, a series of complications has repeatedly plagued the F22 program. Roughly an hour before Mayville’s remarks, US President Barack Obama said during a brief address from the White House in Washington, DC that American forces began strikes in Syria against the Islamic State — also known as ISIS, or ISIL — with the aid of five Arab nations: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Bahrain and Qatar. “The proponent of the force” used against IS, Mayville said, was delivered by America’s military, both by air and by sea. (AP) WASHINGTON — Combined U.S.-Arab airstrikes hit Islamic State military strongholds in Syria and Iraq, and a simultaneous U.S. strike targeted an al-Qaida cell said to be plotting direct assaults on American and other Western interests, the U.S. military said Tuesday. President Barack Obama declared that Arab support for the airstrikes “makes it clear to the world this is not America’s fight alone.” “We’re going to do what’s necessary to take the fight to this terrorist group, for the security of the country and the regime and for the entire world,” Obama said as he left Washington for meetings of the U.N. General Assembly in New York. Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, the top American military official, said the U.S. and its Arab allies achieved their aim of showing the extremists that their attacks will not go unanswered. The U.S. and five Arab nations attacked the Islamic State group’s headquarters in eastern Syria in nighttime raids Monday using land- and sea-based U.S. aircraft as well as Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from two Navy ships in the Red Sea and the northern Persian Gulf. “These strikes were very successful,” said Rear Admiral John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary. In Syria, activists said the trikes hit targets in and around the city of Raqqa and the province with the same name. Raqqa is the Islamic State group’s self-declared capital in Syria. Rami Abdurrahman, who heads the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told The Associated Press, “There is confirmed information that there are casualties among Islamic State group members.” The strikes weren’t coordinated with the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad, said Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, but he added: “There was no resistance, no interaction with Syrian air forces or military defenses.” Apparently trying to position his government on the side of the airstrikes, Assad said Tuesday that he supported any international effort against terrorism. He spoke during a meeting with Faleh al-Fayadh, an envoy of Iraq’s prime minister. American warplanes also carried out eight airstrikes to disrupt what the military described as “imminent attack plotting against the United States and Western interests” by the shadowy Khorosan Group, a network of al-Qaida veterans working with the Yemeni branch of al-Qaida, known as Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, to get foreign fighters with Western passports and explosives to target U.S. aviation.

• published: 23 Sep 2014
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