LONDON — US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said on Monday that the international community was “surprised to see that opposition forces moved as quickly as they did”. Syria in fact, the government of President Bashar al-Assad fell in the face of a surprise attack by the rebels.
“Everybody expected to see tougher resistance from Assad’s forces,” Austin said while in Japan, his last trip to the Indo-Pacific region as defense secretary.
The speed of development, he added, “was surprising, I think, to most of the international community.”
The fall of Damascus to rebels on Sunday was “a historic opportunity for the Syrian people to build a better future for their country.” Joe Biden he said in a message to X, adding: “It is also a time of risk and uncertainty.”
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is pictured at a news conference on October 31, 2024 in Washington.
Leah Millis/Reuters
US forces are already moving to eliminate any signs of an ISIS resurgence in central and eastern Syria, where hundreds of American personnel have been active for several years alongside Kurdish forces to defeat the remnants of the jihadist group.
US forces conducted 75 strikes against ISIS targets in central Syria on Sunday to “disrupt, degrade and defeat” the group, the head of US Central Command said in a statement.
Austin said the strikes were designed to “keep pressure on ISIS.”
“As this develops, there is the potential that elements in the field, such as ISIS, could try to take advantage of this opportunity and try to regain capability,” he explained.
“We’ve been tracking ISIS for some time as part of our ‘Defeat ISIS’ campaign, as you know, and we’ve seen cells in the Vidalia desert that were trying to strengthen and develop additional capabilities and those attacks focused on those cells,” Austin said.
US forces are “still evaluating the results, but I think we’ll see that we’ve been pretty successful,” Austin said.
An anti-government fighter prays in the courtyard of the historic Umayyad mosque in the Syrian capital Damascus on December 8, 2024.
Abdulaziz Ketaz/AFP via Getty Images
