U.S. resumes attacks against ISIS in Syria

MANAMA, Bahrain — U.S. troops have resumed large-scale counterterrorism missions against the Islamic State group in northern Syria, military officials said, nearly two months after President Donald Trump’s order to withdraw U.S. troops opened the way for a bloody Turkish cross-border offensive.

U.S.-backed operations against Islamic State fighters in the area effectively ground to a halt for weeks despite warnings from intelligence analysts that Islamic State militants were beginning to make a comeback from Syrian desert redoubts even though their leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had been killed during a U.S. raid Oct. 26.

On Friday, U.S. soldiers and hundreds of Syrian Kurdish fighters — the same local allies the Trump administration abandoned to fend for themselves against the Turkish advance last month — reunited to conduct what the Pentagon said was a large-scale mission to kill and capture Islamic State fighters in Deir el-Zour province, about 120 miles south of the Turkish border. “Over the next days and weeks, the pace will pick back up against remnants of ISIS,” Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie, the commander of the military’s Central Command, told reporters on the sidelines of the Manama Dialogue security conference in Bahrain on Saturday, using an alternative name for the Islamic State.

The resumption of extensive counterterrorism operations capped a tumultuous two months in which many of the nearly 1,000 U.S. troops in northeastern Syria flew or drove out of the country under Trump’s withdrawal order. Separately, several hundred other troops, some with armored Bradley Fighting Vehicles, arrived from Iraq and Kuwait under a subsequent order from Trump to protect Syria’s eastern oil fields from the Islamic State, as well as from the Syrian government and its Russian partners.

When the dust settles on all of the troop movements, McKenzie said he would have about 500 U.S. forces, or half of what he had before Trump’s directives, operating in an area east of the Euphrates River and Deir el-Zour, north to al-Hasakah and into Syria’s far northeast along the border with Iraq.

The operation Friday in Deir el-Zour province against several Islamic State compounds killed or wounded “multiple” Islamic State fighters and resulted in the capture of more than a dozen others, according to a statement from the U.S. military coalition in Baghdad, which oversees the operations in Syria.