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The war of attrition between the United States and Iran persists alongside the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas. During the overnight hours spanning Thursday to Friday, the US military conducted “self-defense airstrikes” in Deir Ezzor, in eastern Syria, targeting sites used by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and affiliated groups.
On Thursday, nine members associated with Iran-backed groups perished due to American airstrikes on a weapons storage facility in Syria. This action was described as a “response (the second, following the one on October 26, Editor’s note) to a series of attacks on American personnel in Iraq and Syria,” as conveyed by US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in a statement.
Until now, these strikes (carried out through one-way attack drones and rockets) have increased between October 7 and November 7: 40 attacks, including 22 in Iraq and 18 in Syria. “(The attacks) weren’t successful. Our troops did not sustain severe injuries, and our infrastructure (…) did not incur substantial damage,” assessed a Pentagon spokesperson. And to clarify, “We elect to respond in a targeted manner, at the time and place of our choosing. We act strategically whenever we decide to take any action.”
“These acts of self-defense contribute to the credibility of American deterrence policy, which has deployed significant means to keep Tehran out of the conflict,” explained the former chief of the French military mission to the UN, General Dominique Trinquand, to This is Beirut. According to him, “deterrence only succeeds if it proves to be credible, hence the American approach of using such means to bolster the credibility of that policy.” By targeting weapon supplies that could be used against Israel in the ongoing conflict, the United States “sends a clear warning to the Iranians, without hitting Tehran directly, and therefore without instigating an escalation,” according to General Trinquand.
In his statement, Lloyd Austin also sent a clear message to Iranian leaders, urging them to “instruct (pro-Iranian) groups to stop attacking (American forces).” However, according to the former chief of the French military mission to the UN, “the Iranians may not necessarily comply with the Pentagon chief’s directives. As such, the counterattacks will not deter them, and attacks against American bases will continue in Iraq and Syria.” The reason why? Interviewed by This is Beirut, retired General Khalil Helou highlights that the “Iranians are aware of the Americans’ reluctance to engage in a Middle East conflict, mostly due to their concerns regarding the war in Ukraine and China’s expansion in the Pacific.” From this perspective, “Tehran is engaging in an escalating test with the United States,” continued Helou. In this context, it is essential to highlight that, for the past three weeks, the activities of pro-Iranian militias against American bases have been progressively intensifying, enabling the Iranians to “gauge Washington’s threshold of tolerance, which now requires the US to deviate from its initial strategic objectives by addressing such attacks,” as emphasized by the retired General.
The American Strategy
The United States has the capacity to launch a massive strike against Iran,” asserts Helou. This was evident in 1988, during the Iran-Iraq war, when a US destroyer was damaged by mines affixed by Tehran in transit zones within the Strait of Hormuz. Back then, the US Navy conducted Operation Praying Mantis, a naval battle that resulted in the destruction of one-third of the Iranian navy’s forces. This incident should incite Tehran to proceed with caution. Nonetheless, the United States “will refrain from engaging in such a military scenario today, as they would rather not experience an endless guerrilla warfare in the Middle East,” explains Helou. He believes that Iran and the United States are in a logic of positional warfare and a “low-intensity conflict, where American deterrence policy has an impact on Iran but not on its allies, who are willing to do whatever it takes to be part of the political and military stage in the region.”
A Matter of ‘Corridors’
In an interview with This is Beirut, Jean-Sébastien Guillaume, founder of Celtic Intelligence, explains that from an American standpoint, “Iran’s strategic objective is to establish an east-west land corridor stretching from Iran to Lebanon, in addition to the existing aerial route that serves as a supply channel for Iranian weapons to Hezbollah.” The control of Al-Tanf could facilitate this objective. Located in Syria, near the Iraqi border and a few kilometers from the Jordanian border, the US garrison in Al-Tanf has served ever since 2006 as a launching point for operations against the Islamic State and as a training ground for Syrian opposition factions fighting the jihadist group. The NGO International Crisis Group (ICG) explains that “Iranian forces and those supported by Iran are deployed in close proximity to the Al-Tanf desert outpost, located on the strategically important Baghdad-Damascus highway.” According to the ICG, the US forces in Al-Tanf have established a so-called “de-confliction” zone (a term used by the military to refer to measures taken to avoid accidents related to the presence of different actors fighting enemies in the same area) of 55 km, beyond which there is a group of Iran-supported forces that have established checkpoints in the region.
According to Jean-Sébastien Guillaume, and from an Iranian perspective, “the United States seeks to develop a north-south corridor in eastern Syria, extending from the Turkish border to the Jordanian border, controlled by Syrian Kurdish parties and other forces supported by the United States, in order to restrict Iran’s access to its allies in the Middle East.”
