US forces, allies attacked 16 times in Iraq and Syria this month: Pentagon

Amid regional outrage over the United States’ heavy support for the Israeli regime’s ongoing onslaught against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the US says its forces and their allies have been attacked at least 16 times across Iraq and neighboring Syria this month.

Since October 17, “US and coalition forces have been attacked at least 12 separate times in Iraq [and] four separate times in Syria,” Pentagon spokesman Brigadier General Pat Ryder told journalists on Thursday.

Ryder said the latest of the attacks took place in the Kurdistan region in northern Iraq on Thursday, causing “no casualties” and “some minor damage to infrastructure.”

The Pentagon has also confirmed that 19 American troops have been diagnosed with “traumatic brain injury” following the attacks.

The attacks have been carried out with “a mix of one-way attack drones and rockets,” Ryder said.

There are roughly 2,500 American troops in Iraq and some 900 in Syria as part of, what Washington claims to be, a fighting force against Daesh. The US has kept the forces there, although, the Arab countries and their allies defeated the Takfiri terrorist group in late 2017.

Earlier this month, Iraq’s anti-terror group Kata’ib Hezbollah threatened to target American bases in Iraq and the entire region if the United States intervened in the Israeli regime’s October 7-present war against Gaza that has so far claimed more than 7,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children.

The US, Israel’s biggest and oldest allies, has provided Israel with thousands of arms consignments since the initiation of the war, and has backed Tel Aviv’s ferocious attacks on the Palestinian territory as a means of “self-defense.”