DAMASCUS (Dispatches) – A covert U.S. task force came close to decimating a major area in Syria by bombing a dam that the Pentagon had put on a “no-strike list,” a new report says.
In 2017, the American unit bombed the Tabqa dam on the Euphrates in eastern Syria, upstream of Raqqah, where Daesh terrorists were occupying the control towers.
When the attack was originally reported, the U.S. and the Kurdish-led so-called Syrian Democratic Forces claimed that limited munitions were used to seize the location, with the head of the occupation forces then Lieutenant-General Stephen J Townsend describing rumors that it was bombed as “crazy reporting.”
But new analysis by the New York Times, which has uncovered and reviewed a slurry of bombing incidents from the war against Daesh, claimed that three 2,000-lb bombs were deployed.
The attack risked tens of thousands of lives, destroying the dam’s machinery and requiring emergency intervention to prevent the reservoir from flooding. The dam was only saved due to a “bunker-buster” bomb failing to explode.
On March 26, 2017, as the SDF closed in on Raqqah, the U.S. launched the strike with support from its Kurdish allies on the ground, with whom it had established a close relationship for calling in high-powered attacks.
The SDF called for a B-52 — the long-range strategic bomber that has been in continual service since the 1950s — as the fighting party was being blocked from advancing by Daesh terrorists further ahead up the reservoir.
An internal military report had warned that striking the dam would cause flooding that could impact the hundreds of thousands of civilians living in the valley below and place the lives of tens of thousands of civilians at risk, the Times reported.
“Using a 2,000-pound bomb against a restricted target like a dam is extremely difficult and should have never been done on the fly,” Scott F Murray, a retired Air Force colonel who planned air strikes during campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo, told The Times.
“Worst case, those munitions could have absolutely caused the dam to fail.”
Dam workers examining the scene found an unexploded BLU-109 that could have caused the whole dam to fail, experts said.
Engineers who worked at the dam said that a much greater disaster was avoided thanks to the quick work of dam employees at the scene, much of which was carried out under gunpoint.
“The destruction would have been unimaginable,” a former director at the dam told the newspaper.
“The number of casualties would have exceeded the number of Syrians who have died throughout the war.”
The New York Times’ report comes a month after the paper revealed that the U.S. military covered up a covert army cell that repeatedly killed Syrian civilians during the alleged campaign against Daesh.