Airstrikes in Syria: US, Arab allies hit IS sites

The US and Arab allies launched what leaders declared would be a long and sustained military assault against Islamic State strongholds in Syria and Iraq, and the US simultaneously targeted an al-Qaida cell said to be plotting imminent attacks on American and other Western interests, the Pentagon said today.
Hours after the barrage of airstrikes began, Lt Gen William Mayville said the attacks took out key Islamic State training camps and facilities.
But he said it was too early to tell if they were able to disrupt a terrorist attack being planned by al-Qaida militants, known as the Khorasan Group.

He said the group was "nearing the execution phase" of an attack against Europe or the US President Barack Obama said that Arab support for the airstrikes "makes it clear to the world this is not America's fight alone."
"We're going to do what's necessary to take the fight to this terrorist group, for the security of the country and the regime and for the entire world," Obama said as he left Washington for meetings of the UN General Assembly in New York.
Army Gen Martin Dempsey, the top American military official, said the US and its Arab allies achieved their aim of showing the extremists that their attacks will not go unanswered.

The US and five Arab nations attacked the Islamic State group's headquarters in eastern Syria in nighttime raids yesterday using land- and sea-based US aircraft as well as Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from two Navy ships in the Red Sea and the northern Persian Gulf.

Gen Mayville, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at the Pentagon that the US carried out the vast majority of the strikes in an operation against the Islamic State group that he said would continue and likely last "in terms of years."
But he declined to provide details on what the Arab nations did. He said the strikes included Islamic State militants' financial centers in order to disrupt the well-funded group's activities.

In Syria, activists said the trikes hit targets in and around the city of Raqqa and the province with the same name. Raqqa is the Islamic State group's self-declared capital in Syria.
Rami Abdurrahman, who heads the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told The Associated Press, "There is confirmed information that there are casualties among Islamic State group members."
The strikes weren't coordinated with the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad, Mayville said, but Syrian and US officials said that the US informed Syria's envoy to the UN ahead of time.