US continues Syria airstrikes despite Trump's troop withdrawal order: Military

US forces have conducted hundreds of aerial and artillery strikes in Syria and will continue to do so indefinitely despite President Donald Trump’s order to withdraw American troops from the country, the US military’s regional command has announced.

In a Friday press release, Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve (CJTF-OIR) unveiled that US and coalition forces carried out 469 strikes with either air or artillery in Syria between December 16 and 29 in support of the US-sponsored militant group – so-called the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) – in northeastern Syria and against what it proclaimed as “a range of Daesh targets,” military.com reported Saturday.

There is no immediate cutoff date for the air and artillery strikes, added the CJTF-OIR statement, further insisting that US forces "will continue to target Daesh" and "will remain committed to the enduring defeat of Daesh to improve conditions for peace and stability in the region."

According to the US military statement, the strikes were carried out using a variety of platforms, including fighters, attack aircraft, bombers, rotary-wing and remotely piloted aircraft, rocket-propelled artillery and ground-based tactical artillery.

Despite US claims of targeting the Daesh terrorists in Syria, UK-based group known as Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) reported on December 21 that American airstrikes killed at least 27 mostly civilians – including eight children – in the village of al-Sha’afa in Syria’s Eastern Dyr al-Zawr Province, also injuring scores of others.

Contrary to Washington’s repeated claims of battling the Daesh terrorist across Syria, local press reports have documented that it was in fact the Syrian army that led the operation to liberate Dayr Al-Zawr city from the grip of the foreign-backed terrorists in November 2017.

This is while the US-led aerial assaults across Syria have been carried out without authorization from the government in Damascus or a UN mandate. Additionally, they have failed to fulfill their declared aim of countering terrorist forces, but have mostly destroyed much of Syria’s infrastructure -- in line with Israeli regime’s anti-Damascus policies – and left many civilian casualties.

ME