Airstrikes on pro-Iranian militia targets in northeastern Syria were reported overnight between Tuesday and Wednesday by media outlets affiliated with Syria's rebel forces.

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The reports said the strikes were carried out near the village of Bukamal near the Syria-Iraq border and had been carried out by American forces.

Two large explosions were heard at a border operated by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps that serves as a gateway for ammunition being shipped to the pro-Iranian militias in Syria, as well as Iranian military personnel and advanced weaponry destined for the Syrian forces loyal to the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad and Iran.

As of Wednesday morning, there were no reports of casualties or damage at the target site and there were no details about the aircraft that launched the strikes.

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Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah slammed the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in a televised speech Tuesday night carried by official Hezbollah media, saying that the Taliban takeover is the "moral downfall of America."

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The leader of the radical Shiite group said that the lesson to be taken from America's hasty retreat from Afghanistan is that the US is not a reliable partner, specifically mentioning Israel.

"Those watching most closely and drawing conclusions from this are the Israelis," the terrorist leader said.

Nasrallah said that US President Joe Biden was willing to "accept a historic failure" to prove a policy shift that the US will in the future not fight wars for other nations, asking rhetorically what the new American foreign policy would mean for Lebanon and its neighbors.

In a speech at the White House, Biden said he stood by the decision to leave the central Asian nation, despite the Islamist insurgents quickly conquering the entire country, including the capital, Kabul.

Biden said that the goal of the Afghanistan invasion almost 20 years ago was to respond to the 9/11 attacks with a narrow focus on counter-terrorism and was "never supposed to be nation-building."

He said that the US would focus on today's threats that go beyond Afghanistan, while threatening a "devastating" response if the Taliban targeted US interests.

"Everybody must consider it and meditate upon it," Nasrallah said, referring to the Taliban's victory. "Those who most need to draw conclusions and wisdom from this are the peoples of this region."

This article was first published by i24NEWS.

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The United States is returning more than 17,000 ancient artifacts looted and smuggled out of Iraq after the US invasion in 2003, including a 3,500-year-old clay tablet bearing part of the Epic of Gilgamesh, Iraq said on Tuesday.

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Tens of thousands of antiquities disappeared from Iraq after the 2003 invasion that toppled leader Saddam Hussein. Many more were smuggled or destroyed by the iconoclastic Islamic State, which held a third of Iraq between 2014 and 2017 before it was defeated by Iraqi and international forces.

Video: Reuters

US authorities working to recover the artifacts recently reached an agreement with Baghdad to return items seized from dealers and museums in the United States, the Iraqi culture and foreign ministries said.

"The US government seized some of the artifacts and sent them to the (Iraqi) embassy. The Gilgamesh tablet, the important one, will be returned to Iraq in the next month after legal procedures are finalized," Culture Minister Hassan Nadhim told Reuters.

US authorities seized the Gilgamesh tablet in 2019 after it was smuggled, auctioned and sold to an arts dealer in Oklahoma and displayed at a museum in Washington, DC, the Department of Justice said. A court ordered its forfeiture last month, it said.

It said that a US antiquities dealer had bought the tablet from a London-based dealer in 2003. The Epic of Gilgamesh is a 3,500-year-old Sumerian tale considered one of the world's first pieces of literature.

Nadhim said other artifacts being returned included other tablets inscribed in cuneiform script.

Iraq's ancient heritage has been decimated by conflict, destruction and looting especially since 2003. Thousands of artifacts are still missing.

After 2014, Islamic State, which preached an intolerant and extremist interpretation of Islam, raided and wrecked historical sites on what UNESCO called an "industrial" scale, using loot to fund its operations through a smuggling network extending through the Middle East and beyond.

With the help of international agencies, Iraqi authorities have been trying to track down, return and preserve its archaeological relics.

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A senior Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander urged Iraqi Shiite militias to step up attacks on US targets during a meeting in Baghdad last week, three militia sources and two Iraqi security sources familiar with the gathering said.

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American forces in Iraq and Syria were attacked several times following the visit by an Iranian delegation led by Revolutionary Guards intelligence chief Hossein Taeb, which came after deadly US airstrikes against Iran-backed militias at the Syrian-Iraqi border on June 27.

While encouraging retaliation, the Iranians advised the Iraqis not to go too far to avoid a big escalation, three militia sources briefed on the meeting said.

The Iranians did, however, advise them to widen their attacks by retaliating against US forces in Syria, according to one of the three militia sources, a senior local militia commander briefed on the meeting.

The flare-up comes as significant differences cloud diplomatic efforts to revive the Iranian 2015 nuclear agreement, which was abandoned by former US President Donald Trump but which Iran wants reinstated to allow it to resume key exports of oil.

A senior official in the region, who was briefed by Iranian authorities on Taeb's visit, said that Taeb met several Iraqi militia leaders during the trip and conveyed "the supreme leader's message to them about keeping up pressure on US forces in Iraq until they leave the region."

Since the US airstrikes, attacks on US troops and personnel or bases where they operate have intensified in Iraq and widened to eastern Syria.

Iran's foreign ministry did not immediately respond to questions from Reuters for this article, and officials at the Revolutionary Guards public relations office were not immediately available for comment.

Iran's UN envoy this month denied US accusations that Tehran supported attacks on US forces in Iraq and Syria, and condemned US airstrikes on Iranian-backed militants there.

There was no immediate response from the Iraqi government or the prime minister's office to questions about the meeting.

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The official said US President Donald Trump, by announcing a withdrawal of US troops from northern Syria on Oct. 6, did not suggest that Washington would drop the fight against the jihadist group, whose leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was killed in a US raid in Syria on Saturday.

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"There was never an idea that we would abandon the mission of going after ISIS ... This is a major effort that is continuing," the official said to reporters on condition of anonymity.

Trump has been softening his pullout plans for Syria after a backlash from Congress, including fellow Republicans, who say he enabled a long-threatened Turkish incursion on Oct. 9 against Kurdish forces in Syria who had been America's top allies in the battle against Islamic State since 2014.

Trump ordered the withdrawal because he was facing a "chaotic situation" the official said. "Then as the smoke cleared, we adjusted that a little bit to make clear that we were going to keep some forces on, to continue the mission."

Turkey launched its cross-border offensive to drive the Kurdish YPG militia it sees as hostile out of northeastern Syria. Ankara halted the operation after the Kurdish forces pulled out of a designated area under a US-brokered truce.

About 30-40 ministers and organizations that are part of the coalition will convene on the initiative of France and backed by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the official said.

"This is something President Trump has been working on both to get troops on the ground, airplanes in the air and money flowing to stabilization in that area from partners and allies who are in the coalition," he said.

Amid fears that Islamic State could stage a comeback, Trump said last week that a small number of troops would remain in the area of Syria "where they have the oil," a reference to oil fields in the Kurdish-controlled region.

"The President is focused on oil because it is very important to keep that out of the hands of ISIS," the US official said on Monday. "We also don't think it is a good thing for Iranians or the regime to have them."

The official acknowledged, however, that some of the oil ends up in the hands of the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad, who is backed by Russia and Iran in the more than eight-year-long Syrian war.

The death of Baghdadi fulfilled a top national security goal of the Trump administration and was welcomed by world leaders who cautioned that the fight against Islamic State was not over.

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He has gotten his facts wrong on at least five key points about the conflict:

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 Trump: The US-led effort to defeat the Islamic State group was "a mess" before I took office.

It's true that he accelerated the military push in Syria, in part by giving US commanders in the field more authority. But it was during the Obama administration that the Kurdish-led force was recruited, organized and trained to root out the Islamic State group.

Trump also incorrectly said on Monday that US forces have been in Syria for 10 years.

The US military under Obama began its push to counter the Islamic State group, sometimes referred to as the IS group or ISIS, starting in the summer of 2014. The effort started in Iraq, where the extremists had captured much of the northern and western parts of the country, including the key cities of Ramadi and Mosul. In Iraq, unlike in Syria, US forces had a viable partner in the Iraqi government.

Ash Carter, who headed the Pentagon from early 2015 until Trump was inaugurated in January 2017, has acknowledged, "We took longer than we should have to get our act together" on an effective strategy to deal the Islamic State group a lasting defeat. But the campaign was hardly a "mess" when Trump took over.

In fact, Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria were on the verge of falling, and the elements for military success were largely in place. Iraq declared victory over the Islamic State group in December 2017, and the US-backed Kurdish forces declared victory in Syria in March of this year. It remains an open question whether those successes will prove lasting.

 Trump has asserted that the Islamic State group is defeated. "We killed ISIS," he said on Oct. 12.

No one disputes that the Islamic State group has lost its "caliphate" – the large swath of territory it once controlled in parts of Syria and Iraq. But the group remains a threat to reemerge if the conditions that allowed its rise, including civil war in Syria and a lack of effective governance in Iraq, are not corrected.

Republican Sen. Liz Cheney of Wyoming said when Turkey launched its offensive into northern Syria on Oct. 9 that it was "impossible to understand" why Trump was abandoning the Kurds and "enabling the return of ISIS."

Another concern is that the chaos triggered by the Oct. 9 Turkish incursion, which followed Trump's decision to have about two dozen American troops step away from the attack zone, could allow larger numbers of Islamic State fighters to escape from prisons that have been operated by the Kurds now under attack.

Trump has said several times that US troops involved in the anti-Islamic State campaign are coming home.

For now, at least, that is not true. Most of the roughly 1,000 troops leaving Syria are going to Iraq, at least temporarily, or to other locations in the Middle East such as Jordan. The Pentagon says it is still working on plans for how to continue the anti-ISIS campaign in Syria and Iraq.

"We're bringing our soldiers back home," Trump said Monday.

Hogan Gidley, a deputy White House press secretary, said Trump is referring to a goal that must be balanced with other considerations.

"The president does want to ultimately bring all these troops home," Gidley said. "That was his goal when he ran for office. That's what he wants to do now. But he also wants to ensure stability in the region."

Trump says the US controls Syria's oil.

"We've taken control" of it, he said Oct. 18, referring to the oil. Three days later, he recalled his argument that when the US invaded Iraq in 2003, it should have taken Iraq's oil. "I always said, 'If you're going in, keep the oil.' Same thing here [in Syria]. Keep the oil."

In fact, it is by law Syria's oil.

Trump says he is considering a plan for a small number of US troops to remain in the oil-producing region of eastern Syria so that the Islamic State group or someone else cannot take control of the oilfields and use them to generate revenue, such as through oil smuggling.

Trump, nine days into the Turkish onslaught: The Syrian Kurds are "very happy about the way things are going."

The commander of the Kurdish forces, Mazloum Abdi, has welcomed the US-brokered cease-fire along a limited portion of the Syria-Turkey border, but he also has been quoted by news organizations as saying he feels betrayed by the US.

With US forces leaving, the Kurds face the possibility of a grim future. A Turkish takeover would mean crushing the self-rule they had carved out in the northeast amid Syria's long-running civil war. They also fear massive demographic change, as Kurdish civilians flee Turkish control and mainly Arab Syrian refugees move in.

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