It proved to be a busy weekend of international operations for the Trump administration, as US forces were also active in the Middle East.<\/p>\n
Pete Hegseth – who is joining Donald Trump at his press briefing later – said the US launched strikes to “eliminate ISIS fighters, infrastructure, and weapons sites” in Syria on Friday.<\/p>\n
A US official described it as “a large-scale” strike that hit 70 targets in areas across central Syria.<\/p>\n
Three US citizens – two National Guard members and a civilian interpreter – were killed and three more were wounded in an attack in the Syrian desert on 13 December.<\/p>\n
Trump blamed the killings on Islamic State fighters.<\/p>\n
“Because of ISIS’s vicious killing of brave American Patriots in Syria, whose beautiful souls I welcomed home to American soil earlier this week in a very dignified ceremony, I am hereby announcing that the United States is inflicting very serious retaliation, just as I promised, on the murderous terrorists responsible,” he said in a Truth Social post.<\/p>\n
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said more strikes should be expected in the region, so Trump may well have an update to give on these.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It proved to be a busy weekend of international operations for the Trump administration, as US forces were…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":205532,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-205531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=205531"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205531\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/205532"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=205531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=205531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=205531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}