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U.S. special operations forces carried out two major strikes against Islamic State in northern Syria on Thursday, killing three senior officials responsible for arming and recruiting fighters and plotting attacks, according to U.S. and Kurdish officials. Syrians.

Taken together, the nightly assaults dealt the Islamic State its heaviest blow since a risky raid in northwestern Syria in early February by US commandos resulted in the death of the terror group’s leader, Abu Ibrahim. al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi.

The twin attacks began on Thursday morning when special operations forces fell from helicopters in northeastern Syria and killed Rakkan Wahid al-Shammari, who facilitated the smuggling of weapons and fighters to support the operations of ISIS, the Pentagon’s central command said in a statement.

The raid was a rare operation inside Syrian government territory and just a few miles from a Syrian airfield where Russian troops are based.

Several hours later, a deputy leader of Islamic State in Syria and a man responsible for the group’s prisoner affairs were killed in a US drone strike in the north of the country, a senior US military official said.

“This strike will degrade ISIS’s ability to destabilize the region and strike our forces and our partners,” Gen. Michael E. Kurilla, head of the Central Command, said in a statement.

Counterterrorism experts said the US attacks have hurt ISIS’s efforts to regain momentum in the region.

“Killing ISIS’s deputy emir for Syria is a significant achievement given that Syria is clearly where ISIS is investing its resources the most these days,” said Charles Lister, director of the Syria and Counterterrorism and Counterterrorism Programs at the Middle East Institute in Washington.

Even though the Islamic State no longer has the power to control a swath of territory the size of Britain, as it did in Iraq and Syria until 2019, the terror group has shown that it can still carry out devastating coordinated military attacks.

Over the past few weeks and months, its fighters in Iraq have killed Iraqi soldiers and police, beheading an officer on camera. In Syria earlier this year, jihadists raided a prison in an attempt to free thousands of their former comrades and occupied the compound for more than a week before a Kurdish-led, state-backed military force United don’t hunt them.

Thursday’s US attacks came three weeks after the Syrian Democratic Forces, the Pentagon’s Kurdish-led allies in the region, completed a week-long security operation at the sprawling Al Hol detention camp in northeastern Syria.

Syrian Kurdish forces arrested some 300 ISIS operatives living among the 60,000 detainees at the camp – family members of ISIS fighters detained since the fall of the Islamic State religious state in 2019 – seized more than 50 pounds of explosives and removed supplies from ISIS, the Central Command said in a statement last month.

Some counterterrorism analysts have suggested that the US attacks likely stemmed from evidence on the location of ISIS leaders gathered during the sweep of Al Hol, including information obtained by interviewing ISIS operatives. Islamic State who were arrested.

No US forces were injured or killed in the first operation, and no civilians were involved in either attack, US officials said. In the first attack, the commandos also wounded one of the ISIS operative’s associates and captured two others, the Central Command said.

More information was available on the commando raid than on the drone attack.

A Kurdish security official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said airborne troops had landed near a village outside the town of Qamishli before dawn on Thursday.

Syrian state television said “US occupation forces” carried out an aerial assault with the support of Syrian Kurdish forces and one civilian was killed and others abducted.

The independent North Press Agency in northeast Syria said the raid took place in the countryside of Syrian regime territory near Qamishli. Control of the city is shared between the Syrian government and US-allied Kurdish Syrian opposition forces.

The Northern News Agency quoted an anonymous witness as saying that clashes between Syrian forces and gunmen suspected of having links to IS killed a Syrian officer and injured several other members of the security forces.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said US forces raided a private home, killing a man who lived there and arresting members of his family. The group’s director, Rami Abdulrahman, said that after the airdrop, paramilitary fighters allied with the Syrian government opened fire on US forces, who returned fire, wounding several of the fighters.

Syrian TV channel Syria24 said residents of the village, Milouk Saraya, were warned over loudspeakers to stay at home with the lights off. He said a man suspected of being an Islamic State leader, known locally as Abu Hayal, moved to an abandoned house near the village several years ago.

Lister said the airborne assault was the first known US counterterrorism operation in Syrian government-controlled territory since 2008 and took place about 10 miles south of a Syrian airfield where Russian troops were stationed. Russia is an ally of the Syrian government and has troops operating in the same areas as US forces in Kurdish-controlled northeast Syria.

A senior US military official said the United States did not use a special hotline to alert the Russians ahead of the nighttime raid. In previous US operations in the country’s northwest, military officials have used the hotline to give Russians advance warning of an impending US counterterrorism mission to avoid any accidental exchanges between the two rival armies.

“We will conduct operations where we need them if there is a threat against American personnel, our allies or partners, or our interests,” the brigadier said. Pentagon press secretary Gen. Patrick Ryder told reporters on Thursday.