Seven American service members were injured in a recent large joint operation targeting Islamic State militants in western Iraq. More than 100 U.S. troops joined in the mission, which spanned “miles of remote terrain” across Iraq’s Anbar province on Thursday, U.S. officials told the Associated Press, NBC News, and the New York Times.
The early morning raid killed at least 14 alleged ISIS fighters, according to the Iraqi military and U.S. defense officials at Central Command. The militants were “armed with numerous weapons, grenades, and explosive ‘suicide’ belts,” CENTCOM said in a statement on Friday.
Five of the Americans were wounded during the raid, and two others were hurt taking falls as the combined U.S.-Iraqi element hunted terrorists along a riverbed system southwest of Fallujah, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials.
Five have returned to duty for minor injuries, while the other two were taken to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany for follow-on care, Pentagon Press Secretary Air Force Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said Tuesday.
Bigger picture: “ISIS is not the threat that it was ten years ago,” said Ryder on Tuesday, “but…you still have these challenges in places like Syria, where [there are] 9,000 ISIS detainees, and that has to be taken seriously.”
Expert reax: “It’s these longtime ISIS safe havens, deep in Anbar’s desert, that will need consistently [sic] routing, if we’re to avoid an eventual ISIS spillover from Syria to Iraq,” Charles Lister of the Middle East Institute told the Times. “American military analysts on Tuesday were poring over the captured material, which officials said could lead to future raids,” the Times reported.
New: The Justice Department charged six Hamas senior leaders with terrorism, murder conspiracy, and sanctions-evasion for their alleged roles in the October attacks against Israel on Tuesday. Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar topped the list of those charged.
“The Justice Department has charged Yahya Sinwar and other senior leaders of Hamas for financing, directing, and overseeing a decades-long campaign to murder American citizens and endanger the national security of the United States,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement and in a video posted to social media.
“From its inception, Hamas’ stated purpose has been to create an Islamic Palestinian state throughout Israel by eliminating the State of Israel through violent holy war, or jihad,” the Justice Department explained after unsealing the charges Tuesday. “Hamas also promotes attacks against the U.S. and its citizens and, over more than two decades, Hamas has murdered and injured dozens of Americans as part of its campaign of violence and terror,” the officials said. Details, here.
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Nearly a half dozen top Ukrainian officials just resigned ahead of next week’s annual United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York. That includes Kyiv’s top diplomat, Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, who has been on the job for four and a half years.
Apart from Kuleba, “Deputy Prime Minister for European Affairs Olga Stefanishyna; Minister of Strategic Industries Oleksandr Kamyshin — who has played a prominent role in boosting arms production — Minister of Justice Denys Maliuska, and Minister of the Environment Ruslan Strilets all submitted their resignation,” AP reported Tuesday from the capital.
“Autumn will be extremely important for Ukraine,” President Volodymir Zelenskyy said in his Tuesday evening national address. “And our state institutions must be set up in such a way that Ukraine will achieve all the results we need, for all of us,” he said.
These changes were “months in the making,” and as such “not a big surprise,” said Chris Miller of the Financial Times. “Some who’ve resigned will be reappointed to new posts and/or with new portfolios,” he said, and noted, “There are 5 acting ministers, so [the changes are] partly aimed at making [Zelenskyy’s] cabinet whole.”
Developing: A new Russian missile attack killed at least seven people in the western city of Lviv, Zelenskyy said Wednesday. “Ordinary residential buildings, schools, and medical facilities in the city were damaged,” he said separately on social media. More than 50 others were also injured in the strike.
Update: Zelenskyy says Ukraine will “hold” onto the territory it has seized inside Russia with its cross border incursion into the Kursk region one month ago, and it will attempt to hold that land as part of a “victory plan” to end the war, the president told Richard Engel of NBC News on Tuesday.
“For now, we need it,” he said of the estimated 770 km² of land Ukrainian forces occupy in Kursk. “We don’t need their land. We don’t want to bring our Ukrainian way of life there,” he said. But he said it could be useful in future negotiations.
New: President Biden reportedly rejected a plan to send F-16 repair crews into Ukraine to help maintain the U.S.-made jets transferred to Kyiv over the summer, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. As far as Defense One is aware, no serious observers were truly convinced this would occur, at least partly because American deaths inside Ukraine could have unpredictable political consequences back stateside and could torpedo U.S. support for the embattled democracy on autocratic Russia’s doorstep.
Related reading:
NGA’s giant data-labeling effort. In 2023, the entire world spent about $800 million to annotate data to train AI models and machine-learning tools. Now the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is planning to spend nearly that much by itself, Defense One’s Audrey Decker reported Tuesday.
Additional reading:
Lastly today: China claims breakthroughs in autonomous vehicles. “If Chinese companies succeed in solidifying their dominance of the autonomous vehicle and LiDAR markets, the security implications are profound,” write BluePath Labs’ Thomas Corbett and New America’s Peter Singer. Read the latest edition of Singer’s China Intelligence column, here.
