By GHAITH AL­SAYED, LOLI­TA C. BAL­DOR and BASSEM MROUE-As­so­ci­at­ed Press

AT­MEH, Syr­ia (AP) — U.S. spe­cial forces land­ing in he­li­copters as­sault­ed a house in a rebel-held cor­ner of Syr­ia, clash­ing for two hours with gun­men, wit­ness­es said, in what the Pen­ta­gon called a large-scale counter-ter­ror­ism raid. First re­spon­ders re­port­ed that 13 peo­ple had been killed, in­clud­ing six chil­dren and four women.

Res­i­dents de­scribed con­tin­u­ous gun­fire and ex­plo­sions that jolt­ed the town of At­meh near the Turk­ish bor­der, an area dot­ted with camps for in­ter­nal­ly dis­placed peo­ple from Syr­ia’s civ­il war.

The two-sto­ry house, sur­round­ed by olive trees in fields out­side At­meh, was left with its top floor shat­tered and blood spat­tered in­side. A jour­nal­ist on as­sign­ment for The As­so­ci­at­ed Press and sev­er­al res­i­dents said they saw body parts scat­tered near the site. Most res­i­dents spoke on con­di­tion of anonymi­ty for fear of reprisals.

The Pen­ta­gon did not iden­ti­fy the tar­get of the raid in Syr­ia’s rebel-held Idlib province. “The mis­sion was suc­cess­ful,” Pen­ta­gon press sec­re­tary John Kir­by said in a brief state­ment. “There were no U.S. ca­su­al­ties. More in­for­ma­tion will be pro­vid­ed as it be­comes avail­able.”

It was the largest raid in the province since the 2019 Trump-era U.S. as­sault that killed the Is­lam­ic State leader Abu Bakr al-Bagh­da­di.

An Iraqi in­tel­li­gence of­fi­cial in con­tact with the U.S.-led coali­tion said Thurs­day’s tar­get was a high-rank­ing mil­i­tant leader whose iden­ti­ty will be re­leased by the White House lat­er in the day, pend­ing a DNA analy­sis. In­for­ma­tion sug­gests he may be al-Bagh­da­di’s suc­ces­sor, the cur­rent IS leader known as Abu Ibrahim al-Hashi­mi al-Qurayshi, the of­fi­cial added. He spoke on con­di­tion of anonymi­ty to di­vulge sen­si­tive in­for­ma­tion.

AD

Idlib is large­ly con­trolled by Turk­ish-backed fight­ers but is al­so an al-Qai­da strong­hold and home to sev­er­al of its top op­er­a­tives. Oth­er mil­i­tants, in­clud­ing ex­trem­ists from the ri­val IS group, have al­so found refuge in the re­gion.

“The first mo­ments were ter­ri­fy­ing, no one knew what was hap­pen­ing,” said Jamil el-Ded­do, a res­i­dent of a near­by refugee camp. “We were wor­ried it could be Syr­i­an air­craft, which brought back mem­o­ries of bar­rel bombs that used to be dropped on us,” he added, re­fer­ring to crude ex­plo­sives-filled con­tain­ers used by Pres­i­dent Bashar As­sad’s forces against op­po­nents dur­ing the Syr­i­an con­flict.

The top floor of the low house was al­most to­tal­ly de­stroyed; a room there had col­lapsed, send­ing white bricks tum­bling to the ground be­low.

Blood could be seen on the walls and floor of the re­main­ing struc­ture. A wrecked bed­room had a child’s wood­en crib and a stuffed rab­bit doll. On one dam­aged wall, a blue plas­tic ba­by swing was still hang­ing. The kitchen was lit­tered with de­bris, with a blood splat­ter on the wall where the door was blown off its hinges. Re­li­gious books, in­clud­ing a bi­og­ra­phy of Is­lam’s Prophet Mo­ham­mad, were in the house.

The op­po­si­tion-run Syr­i­an Civ­il De­fense, first re­spon­ders al­so known as the White Hel­mets, said 13 peo­ple were killed in shelling and clash­es that en­sued af­ter the U.S. com­man­do raid. They in­clud­ed six chil­dren and four women, it said.

The Britain-based Syr­i­an Ob­ser­va­to­ry for Hu­man Rights, an op­po­si­tion war mon­i­tor, al­so said the strike killed 13 peo­ple, in­clud­ing four chil­dren and two women. Ah­mad Rah­hal, a cit­i­zen jour­nal­ist who vis­it­ed the site, re­port­ed see­ing 12 bod­ies.

The Pen­ta­gon pro­vid­ed no de­tails on ca­su­al­ties in the raid.

The Ob­ser­va­to­ry said the troops land­ed in he­li­copters. Res­i­dents and ac­tivists de­scribed wit­ness­ing a large ground as­sault, with U.S. forces us­ing mega­phones urg­ing women and chil­dren to leave the area.

Omar Saleh, a res­i­dent of a near­by house, said he was asleep when his doors and win­dows start­ed to rat­tle to the sound of low-fly­ing air­craft at 1:10 a.m. lo­cal time. He ran to open the win­dows with the lights off, and saw three he­li­copters. He then heard a man, speak­ing Ara­bic with an Iraqi or Sau­di ac­cent through a loud­speak­er, urg­ing women to sur­ren­der or leave the area.

“This went on for 45 min­utes. There was no re­sponse. Then the ma­chine gun fire erupt­ed,” Saleh said. He said the fir­ing con­tin­ued for two hours, as air­craft cir­cled low over the area.

Taher al-Omar, an Idlib-based ac­tivist, said he wit­nessed clash­es be­tween fight­ers and the U.S. force. Oth­ers re­port­ed hear­ing at least one ma­jor ex­plo­sion dur­ing the op­er­a­tion. A U.S. of­fi­cial said that one of the he­li­copters in the raid suf­fered a me­chan­i­cal prob­lem and had to be blown up on the ground. The U.S. of­fi­cial spoke on con­di­tion of anonymi­ty to dis­cuss de­tails of the mil­i­tary op­er­a­tion.

The mil­i­tary op­er­a­tion got at­ten­tion on so­cial me­dia, with tweets from the re­gion de­scrib­ing he­li­copters fir­ing around the build­ing near At­meh. Flight-track­ing da­ta al­so sug­gest­ed that mul­ti­ple drones were cir­cling the city of Sar­ma­da and the vil­lage of Sal­wah, just north of the raid’s lo­ca­tion.

The U.S. has in the past used drones to kill top al-Qai­da op­er­a­tives in Idlib, which at one point was home to the group’s biggest con­cen­tra­tion of lead­ers since the days of Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. The fact that spe­cial forces land­ed on the ground sug­gest the tar­get was be­lieved to be of high val­ue.

A sim­i­lar at­tack in Pak­istan, in 2011, killed bin Laden.

Thurs­day’s clan­des­tine op­er­a­tion came as the Is­lam­ic State group has been re­assert­ing it­self in Syr­ia and Iraq with in­creased at­tacks.

Last month, it car­ried out its biggest mil­i­tary op­er­a­tion since it was de­feat­ed and its mem­bers scat­tered un­der­ground in 2019: an at­tack on a prison in north­east Syr­ia hold­ing at least 3,000 IS de­tainees. The at­tack ap­peared aimed to break free se­nior IS op­er­a­tives in the prison.

It took 10 days of fight­ing for U.S.-backed, Kur­dish-led forces to re­take the prison ful­ly, and the force said more than 120 of its fight­ers and prison work­ers were killed along with 374 mil­i­tants. The U.S.-led coali­tion car­ried out airstrikes and de­ployed Amer­i­can per­son­nel in Bradley Fight­ing Ve­hi­cles to the prison area to help the Kur­dish forces.

A se­nior SDF of­fi­cial, Nowruz Ah­mad, said Mon­day that the prison as­sault was part of a broad­er plot that IS had been prepar­ing for a long time, in­clud­ing at­tacks on oth­er neigh­bor­hoods in Kur­dish-run north­east­ern Syr­ia and on the al-Hol camp in the south, which hous­es thou­sands of fam­i­lies of IS mem­bers.

The U.S.-led coali­tion has tar­get­ed high-pro­file mil­i­tants on sev­er­al oc­ca­sions in re­cent years, aim­ing to dis­rupt what U.S. of­fi­cials say is a se­cre­tive cell known as the Kho­rasan group that is plan­ning ex­ter­nal at­tacks. A U.S. airstrike killed al-Qai­da’s sec­ond in com­mand, for­mer bin Laden aide Abu al-Kheir al-Mas­ri, in Syr­ia in 2017.

Bal­dor re­port­ed from Wash­ing­ton, D.C. and Mroue from Beirut. As­so­ci­at­ed Press writ­ers Zeina Karam in Beirut and Qas­sim Ab­dul-Zahra in Bagh­dad con­tributed re­port­ing.