Page 94 - AirForces - Monthly (February 2020)

Operation Inherent Resolve

the great

Syriaescape

ordered to pull out of Syria in O column of US Army mine-protected agreed to a request from his Turkish counterpart,
When US special forces were n a grassy plain in northwest Syria a conversation, US President Donald Trump
vehicles was lined up beside a rough
October 2019 the Pentagon had airstrip waiting to be loaded into the cavernous Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, to pull US troops out
from Syria to allow his troops to occupy a
to activate emergency plans to hold of a US Air Force C-17A airlifter from buffer zone on the Syrian side of the border.
evacuate its troops. Tim Ripley Air Mobility Command (AMC). Behind the It was a move that shocked the world.
looks at the airlift mission to extract vehicles, a gaggle of forklift trucks could
American soldiers from Syria. be seen preparing cargo pallets and ISO Turkey attacks
containers for loading. Overhead a pair of US Erdoğan had long viewed the SDF militia as
Army AH-64D attack helicopters was circling a front for Kurdish PKK ‘terrorists’ and he had
the airstrip to monitor the movement of civilian repeatedly pressed Trump to allow Turkish
vehicles on the roads that passed to the south. troops to enter Syria to hunt them down. When
Operation Break Glass was under way. Trump agreed to pull US observation posts back
Only days earlier, 1,000 American troops had from the Syria-Turkish border at the beginning
been patrolling northeastern Syria in alliance of October it set off a chain of events.
with a local militia organisation, known as the The Turkish operation began on October 9
Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). At the start of with a series of air strikes on Kurdish positions
Above: A US Army UH-60M Black Hawk at an
undisclosed location in Syria, on October 31, 2019. The 2018, the Kurdish-led SDF, helped by US, British by Türk Hava Kuvvetleri (THK, Turkish Air Force)
US military has remained in the area to help protect and French special forces advisors and air power, F-16C/D Fighting Falcons and armed Bayraktar
high-value sites. USMC/Sgt Branden J Bourque had overrun the last enclave of the so-called tactical unmanned aerial systems (UAS). These
Right: Loading pallets of ammunition onto a C-17A Islamic State (IS) in eastern Syria, effectively strikes concentrated on targets inside the 19-
Globemaster III at Kobanî Landing Zone (KLZ) on
October 21 during the phased withdrawal from Syria. ending the five-year-old Jihadi Caliphate. mile (30km)-deep ‘security zone’ that the Turks
US Army/SSgt Joshua Hammock In a bizarre and now infamous telephone wanted to set up, free of SDF militia fighters.

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