Secret Documents Reveal Iran’s Plans to Launch Attacks on US Forces in Syria
Iran is arming some extremist groups in Syria for a new phase of deadly attacks against U.S. forces in the country while also working with Russia on a broader strategy to drive Americans out of the region, intelligence officials and leaked confidential documents said.
Iran’s Plans
According to the Washington Post, Iran and its allies are building and training forces to use more powerful armor-piercing roadside bombs specifically designed to target U.S. military vehicles and kill American personnel, according to classified intelligence reports.
Such attacks would constitute an escalation of Iran’s long-term campaign to use proxy militias to launch missile and drone attacks on U.S. forces in Syria, the newspaper said.
Intelligence analysts and former weapons experts said that drone attacks injured six U.S. service members and killed a Defense Department contractor, and the new devices could add to the U.S. death toll, threatening a broader military confrontation with Iran, where pro-Iran insurgents used the same type of weapon, called explosively formed penetrators, in deadly attacks against U.S. military convoys during the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
The U.S. newspaper reported that officials in Iran’s Qods Force unit created the plot and oversaw the testing of an explosive, which was said to have rigged an armored plate of a tank in a late January experiment east of Damascus, the Syrian capital, according to an intelligence information. Reports. The document, part of a collection of classified material leaked on the messaging platform Discord, appears to be based on intercepted communications by Syrian and Lebanese militants allied with Iran.
A single attempt to use such devices against U.S. forces appears to have been thwarted in late February when U.S.-allied Kurdish fighters seized three bombs in northeast Syria, according to a second document.
Syria’s Perils
“There has been a radical change in their acceptance of the risks in killing Americans in Syria,” said Michael Knights, an expert on Iranian-backed militant groups and founder of the Spotlight Militia website.
He pointed to the devastating casualties that armor-piercing bombs caused during the Iraq war, adding: “This is definitely going to kill people, and they are seriously thinking about how to do it.”
The past three U.S. administrations have maintained a small contingent of U.S. forces in Syria — about 900 troops at any one time, augmented by hundreds of other contractors — to prevent the return of ISIS fighters in the country, thwart Iranian and Russian ambitions, and provide leverage for other strategic goals.
