U.S. airstrikes target militants in Syria plotting against West

An overnight U.S. aerial assault in northern Syria struck Al Qaeda-linked extremists who were plotting to attack the West, the U.S. military said Thursday.

Targeted was an Al Qaeda faction that U.S. authorities call the Khorasan Group, composed of “extremists who share a history of training operatives, facilitating fighters and money, and planning attacks against U.S. and Western targets,” the U.S. Central Command said in a statement.

Published reports indicated that among those who may have been killed is a French militant known as a skilled bomb maker. Many jihadists from Europe and elsewhere have traveled to Syria and joined up with various armed groups operating amid the chaos of the more than three-year civil war.

“This network was plotting to attack in Europe or the homeland, and we took decisive action to protect our interests and remove their capability to act,” the Central Command said, without further details. “We will continue to take any action necessary to disrupt attack plotting against U.S. interests.”

The United States has launched scores of airstrikes in Syria since September, with the vast majority targeting the Islamic State, an Al Qaeda breakaway faction that has overrun vast stretches of Syria and neighboring Iraq. President Obama has vowed that U.S. forces would “degrade and ultimately destroy” the organization.

But the overnight strikes reported Thursday were the first since September directed at the Khorasan Group, which remains a shadowy organization — despite the considerable attention it has garnered from the U.S. intelligence and defense establishments. The group is composed of veteran Al Qaeda operatives, U.S. officials say.

Syrian opposition groups reported that civilians, including four children, were among those killed in the coalition strikes. The military had no immediate comment on the reports.

While U.S. officials were still assessing the outcome of the attack, the military cited “initial indications that it resulted in the intended effects by striking terrorists and destroying or severely damaging several Khorasan Group vehicles and buildings assessed to be meeting and staging areas,” as well as hitting training areas and bomb-making facilities.

The military deployed bomber, fighter and remotely piloted aircraft in five airstrikes, the Pentagon said.

While the military said Khorasan was the sole target, pro-opposition activists said operatives from the Al Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front were hit. However, they said it did not appear that airstrikes were meant to aid U.S.-backed Syrian rebels in their ongoing struggles with Nusra fighters.

Last week, the Nusra Front, along with other Islamist factions, commandeered the positions in Syria’s northern Idlib province of two U.S.-backed Syrian rebel groups, the Syrian Revolutionaries Front and Haraket Hazm. Nusra’s online supporters also boasted of confiscating batches of U.S. hardware, including several armored vehicles and TOW anti-tank missiles.

The rout of the U.S.-supported armed factions has further complicated Western initiatives to bolster what U.S officials call “moderate” elements in the fractious Syrian rebel ranks. A multitude of factions of varying ideologies has taken up arms against the secular government of Syrian President Bashar Assad. Syrian government forces have withdrawn from large stretches of northern Syria.

Officials from the two U.S.-backed groups retreating in the face of Al Qaeda advances acknowledge that the latest strikes were not meant to reverse their declining military fortunes.

“When the Americans want to strike, they do it on their own. They don’t coordinate with us,” said Ahmad Bakkour, a Hazm Movement spokesman contacted via phone in the Turkish city of Reyhanli.

U.S.-backed rebel groups have repeatedly called on Washington to turn its firepower on the Assad government. The U.S. aerial assault has not targeted government positions, though the White House has called on Assad to step down and has provided aid and training to various rebel factions.

Bulos is a special correspondent. Times staff writer Raja Abdulrahim in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

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