President Donald Trump over the weekend promised retaliation against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, after the reported deaths of three American citizens, including two soldiers, in a late-night attack in Syria.
“This was an ISIS attack against the U.S., and Syria, in a very dangerous part of Syria, that is not fully controlled by them,” Trump posted Saturday on Truth Social. “The President of Syria, Ahmed al-Sharaa, is extremely angry and disturbed by this attack. There will be very serious retaliation.”
Three American military personnel and two members of Syrian security forces were also wounded in the attack, along with the two U.S. Army soldiers and a civilian interpreter. The American soldiers killed were part of an Iowa National Guard contingent assigned to the Syria mission.
The group came under fire from a lone gunman while supporting counterterrorism operations against the Islamic State in central Syria, The New York Times reported.
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“I can tell you in Syria there will be a lot of damage done to the people that did it,” Trump said about the attack during a Sunday afternoon speech from the White House. “They got the person, the individual person, but there’ll be big damage done.”
Central Command said in a post on X that the identities of those killed “will be withheld until 24 hours after their next of kin have been notified.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also condemned the attack, writing in a post on X, “if you target Americans — anywhere in the world — you will spend the rest of your brief, anxious life knowing the United States will hunt you, find you, and ruthlessly kill you.”
The U.S. has been slowly ramping down its presence in Syria since Trump assumed office, pulling nearly half of the 2,000 American troops stationed in the country. American troops have had a presence in the country since 2014, working for most of that time with the Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish-led militia that controls much of the nation’s northeast, to provide training and equipment in their efforts to counter the Islamic State.
The stability of the Syrian state continues to fracture following a rebellion that ousted the country’s dictator Bashar al-Assad, who led the country through 14 years of civil war.
Trump welcomed Syria’s new president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, who led the rebel forces against al-Assad and previously had a $10 million U.S. bounty on his head due to his ties to Al Qaeda, to the White House last month. Shortly after, the country announced that it had joined the U.S.-led international coalition fighting against the Islamic State.
“We want to see Syria become a country that’s very successful, and I think this leader can do it,” Trump said in November. “I really do. I think this leader can do it. And people said he’s had a rough past. We have all had rough pasts.”
Democratic Sen. Jack Reed, the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, said during an interview on “Fox News Sunday” that he hoped the U.S. and the new Syrian government could work together to accomplish their shared goal of “defeating ISIS.”
“We have to be very aggressive and work with the new government in Syria. We have our opportunity, for the first time in a long time, to work with a Syrian government that shares many of our own hopes and aspirations in terms of defeating ISIS,” Reed
said.
Trump and al-Sharaa first met in May in Saudi Arabia, according to NPR, the first official encounter between the U.S. and Syrian leaders since 2000, when then-President Bill Clinton met with Bashar al-Assad’s father, then-President Hafez al-Assad.
Speaking Sunday morning on “Fox News Sunday,” Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham celebrated the administration’s hard-line response to the attack, saying “ISIS would come here if they could.”
“God bless President Trump for wanting to retaliate,” Graham added.
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