The average person in the U.S. is around $96,400 in debt… but, as Statista’s Katharina Buchholz notes, if Americans would be charged by their hometowns and cities for the debt they have taken on in the name of their residents, a fairly big sum would be added to that tally.
According to a report by think tank Truth in Accounting, 50 out of the 75 largest cities in the U.S. are currently running a deficit – in some cases a major one.
If New York City would divide the money amiss in its FY2021 budget among all of its taxpayers, this would add the hefty sum of $56,900 to each New Yorker’s debt.
However, New York City’s debt has decreased – by more than 11 percent since 2017. In the rest of the top 5 indebted cities in the U.S., debt has been growing quite substantially.
New Orleans, where debt grew by almost a third in the time frame, is one such example. This caused the city to rise from the 10th most in debt to the 5th most in debt. Portland meanwhile climbed from rank 8 into rank 4.
On the other side of the ranking are Washington D.C., San Francisco and Irvine, Calif. All three cities had a sizable surplus in FY2021 in part due to favorable market conditions.
This instance will have helped them still balance their budgets in the downturn year of 2022.
Something that Truth in Accounting is pointing out in its reports is how high municipal debt can endanger city workers’ pensions and similar benefits. In the case of New Orleans, the report states that only 55 cents for every dollar of pledged pension benefits had been put away in the city. In Portland, this number was even lower at only 44 cents to the dollar. Despite being obligated to pay employees’ pension and retiree health care benefits when these come up, many cities decide to put off building these funds and even omit the respective items from city balance sheets.
The AMA even supplies members with social media talking points and strategies to deal with vaccine detractors.
It is not the first time that my profession has endorsed a product that may be hazardous to your health.
For most of the 20th century, the AMA turned a blind eye toward the dangers of tobacco use. During the 1930s, 40s and 50s, tobacco companies paid handsomely to advertise cigarettes in AMA’s journal, JAMA. In a 1948 editorial minimizing the ill effects of smoking and justifying tobacco advertising in its publications, JAMA noted that “cigarette business is a tremendous business,” as if the size of the bottom line can mitigate a conflict for an organization founded for the “betterment of public health.”
The connection between smoking and lung cancer was recognized early in the century. At the same time, the AMA became increasingly dependent on money generated by tobacco sales. Tobacco companies sponsored meetings of medical societies, setting up their booths alongside exhibitions of the latest medical treatments. Free cartons were distributed at physician meetings. Cigarette makers even paid for publication of pseudoscientific reports claiming the health benefits of their products.
Doctors who opposed smoking faced ridicule from their colleagues.Dr. Alton Ochsner, a renowned surgeon and sentinel voice warning of the dangers of tobacco, began publishing on the connection between smoking and lung cancer in the early 1940s. His 1954 book Smoking and Cancer: A Doctor’s Report was negatively reviewed in prominent medical journals, characterized as a medieval model of logic that belongs in the nonscience section of a library. Prior to his appearance on Meet the Press, Dr. Ochsner was told he could not discuss the relationship between smoking and lung cancer on air.
Yet the mounting evidence was hard to ignore. In 1954, JAMA stopped accepting cigarette advertisements and published an editorial rebuking tobacco company advertising practices. But five years later, a JAMA editorial was still skeptical of the evidence linking smoking to cancer, and a 1961 Nebraska State Medical Journal editorial dismissed the evidence as merely “statistical.” Tobacco companies continued to sponsor state medical meetings as late as 1969. By then most people were aware of the dangers of smoking.
In 1964, the Surgeon General concluded that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer and other life-limiting health conditions. The next year, a warning label was required on packages of cigarettes. By 1971, the government banned cigarette advertisements on television and radio. Instead of taking the lead against an obvious threat to public health, the AMA asked for time and money to study the effects of tobacco.
Between 1964 and 1976, the AMA received more than $20 million from the tobacco industry to fund research. Instead of using the money for smoking cessation programs, many of the funded studies focused on ways to make a safer cigarette. To keep money flowing into its Education and Research Foundation the AMA delayed, stating in a confidential 1971 report that, “AMA is not prepared to make any statement regarding termination of the smoking-health research program.” The report went on to complain that tobacco companies are “in arrears on 1970 contributions.” The dependency on tobacco money created a political alliance between doctors and cigarette makers as their lobbyists joined forces in Washington.
The delay benefitted tobacco sales and maintained the AMA’s “research” payments, but it angered Dr. Ochsner, who accused the AMA of being derelict. The AMA called Dr. Ochsner’s position “extreme.” But name-calling could not stall the inevitable conclusion any longer. In 1978 the AMA finally agreed with what most people had already realized: smoking causes lung cancer, and many other health problems. The romance with big tobacco was over.
Or was it?
As late as 1982, JAMA publications were warned to steer clear of “politically sensitive” topics like tobacco use. After most of a century of being on the tobacco dole, the AMA could not make a clean break. The AMA portfolio contained investments in tobacco companies until the late 1990s.
In 1998, the tobacco industry settled lawsuits filed by state governments with a massive Master Settlement Agreement. In exchange for perpetual annual payments and tight regulatory control, the tobacco industry could continue to sell its products protected from future lawsuits brought by participating states and jurisdictions.
But who really benefitted from the Tobacco Settlement? Only 2.6 percent of the money has been used for smoking prevention and cessation programs. Some states have used the tobacco money to fill budget gaps. South Carolina gave money to tobacco farmers affected by a drop in prices. Altria Group, a global tobacco company, is on the US News & World Report 10 best-performing stocks list. Altria, Phillip Morris, and British American Tobacco have all grown annual dividends consecutively since the settlement. According to Dr. Ed Anselm, “The most addictive thing about tobacco is money.”
Tobacco use remains the number one preventable cause of death in the United States. In the first fifty years after the Surgeon General’s 1964 report, more than 20 million Americans died of smoking. How many of these deaths would have been prevented if doctors had not been conflicted by financial entanglements with the tobacco industry?
The New York State Journal of Medicine published a retrospective of tobacco’s relationship to medicine in its December 1983 issue. Flipping through the pages is enlightening. Surrounding the articles describing the greed and politics of Big Tobacco are advertisements from medicine’s new love—Big Pharma. Doctors have exchanged one bedfellow for another.
By endorsing irrelevant COVID-19 vaccines and poorly tested bivalent boosters, the AMA is pushing a product without concern for its potential negative health effects. Like before, the medical profession lags behind public opinion. According to recent Rasmussen Reports, 7 percent of vaccinated individuals report a major side effect, and nearly half of Americans believe that COVID-19 vaccines have caused unexplained deaths, about the same proportion who believed that smoking caused cancer in the 1960s while the AMA was studying the issue.
A conflicted profession cannot honestly evaluate data. Nowadays, the pharmaceutical business is a tremendous business. An organization benefitting from product sales cannot be trusted to evaluate that product.
If doctors could not recognize the health dangers of tobacco for most of the last century, why should we trust them when they say novel vaccines are safe and effective?
Keith Olbermann Calls For “Economic Civil War” To Institute Gun Control
Keith Olbermann, generally considered a washed up “journalist” with a modicum of his former influence, is nonetheless a prominent voice of madness within the easily led leftist fold. People like him should be considered a valuable litmus test for what the political left is really thinking, including the kinds of sentiments they rarely say out loud.
The subject matter of his recent podcast should raise some eyebrows among anyone concerned about constitutional integrity or the 2nd Amendment, as Olbermann proudly suggests that Democrat controlled blue states should engage in economic civil war with red states in order to destroy conservative support for gun ownership.
“WE MUST HAVE ECONOMIC CIVIL WAR.
“There is only one way to stop Mass Shootings. The Blue States must financially starve the Red States, the Gun Lobby, the GOP, the Death Lobby, and the crooked judiciary into submission.
Olbermann’s theory is based on the assumption that blue states “have all the money” and that red states are somehow destitute and reliant on the good graces of rich Democrats. This idea often stems from a common progressive assumption that all conservatives are poverty stricken “rednecks” trapped in “flyover country.” It just confirms what we have long known – Progressives live in a regional bubble and rarely venture out of the hive mind they rely on daily.
It’s a bizarre notion considering Americans have been leaving major blue states by the millions over the past few years due to economic decline, high taxes and draconian covid mandates. This mass migration has been well documented, so it’s odd that Olbermann is unaware of it. It’s not just individuals, but also businesses that are fleeing leftist areas and moving to conservative havens.
In 2021, there wasn’t enough U-Haul trucks to accommodate all the people trying to escape California. What were the destinations movers were going to? Florida and Texas topped the list. The California state government was so desperate to stop people from leaving (and desperate to maintain tax revenues) that they tried to pass a law requiring that former residents continue to pay taxes to CA for up to 10 years. How they plan to enforce such a law is unknown, but the legislation reveals a panic among Democrats which is palpable.
The mass exodus was not limited to California, though, and included states like New York, Illinois and New Jersey. In terms of raw data, blue states make up the vast majority of the most indebted places in the US, and a list of the 10 most fiscally stable states is majority red.
In general, the biggest problems red states have in terms of economic disparity or crime are caused by Democrat run cities within their borders. Wherever progressives manage things, disaster follows.
Olbermann’s call for an economic civil war is delusional and impractical, but it does reveal a certain level of anxiety that leftists have about gun owners. Not in terms of gun violence – They don’t actually care about gun related deaths; they only care about how such tragedies can be exploited for political gain. What they do care about, it seems, is the fact that shooting events are not giving them the social leverage they used to get.
In the past, the corporate media could run with a single mass shooting for many months in an effort to create hysteria over gun ownership. However, gun ownership is rising among some Democrat and moderate voters. And, concerns are increasing over economic instability and exploding crime in the US. What leftists are realizing is that they are never going to get the guns because the public is realizing how much they need tools for self defense. The citizenry is beginning to understand that gun control is a means to punish law abiding people for the actions of a handful of criminals.
Not only that, but an armed populace is a hard to dominate populace. The goal of every authoritarian regime has been to first disarm their political enemies so that they can’t fight back. Leftist intentions are clearly based on a desire for control that compels them to obsess over gun rights. They are even openly talking about extreme measures, including civil war, as a vehicle for gun control. This is a good sign, because it shows how close the anti-gun rights lobby is to defeat.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg faced sharp criticism after he appeared to cast some of the blame for the Ohio train derailment onto former President Donald Trump because the Department of Transportation (DOT) under the former president nixed an Obama-era regulation on advanced train brake systems.
The derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, on Feb. 3 of a freight train carrying hazardous chemicals sparked a blaze, releasing toxins into the air and forcing evacuations.
Buttigieg’s office did not address the incident for days, with the Transportation secretary breaking his silence on Feb. 14, saying he was “concerned about the impacts” of the derailment, which also led to contaminants entering the Ohio River, killing several thousand fish.
Buttigieg also took aim at the Trump-era DOT for axing a rule on the use of electronically controlled pneumatic (ECP) brakes.
“We’re constrained by law on some areas of rail regulation (like the braking rule withdrawn by the Trump administration in 2018 because of a law passed by Congress in 2015), but we are using the powers we do have to keep people safe,” Buttigieg said in a tweet.
The Transport Secretary’s tweet drew a flurry of reactions on social media, many critical.
“This is an absolutely insane thing to tweet,” wrote Jack Kennedy of Barstool Sports, in a tweet.
“This is the state of the Biden administration: Blame Trump for something that happened exclusively under their watch,” wrote Canary CEO Dan K. Eberhart in a tweet.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) took to Twitter to remark: “It’s 2023 @PeteButtigieg. Stop blaming Trump.”
As part of Trump’s cutting regulations that he said slowed the economy, the DOT in 2018 withdrew an Obama-era rule that was opposed by railroads requiring trains carrying certain hazardous chemicals to use ECP brakes.
At least 20 women who were victims of sex trafficking and sexual abuse at Jeffrey Epstein properties were paid through JPMorgan Chase accounts, according to a new court filing.
The women were allegedly abused and trafficked at properties in the U.S. Virgin Islands, New York, and elsewhere between 2003 and 2019.
The women received payments that totaled, collectively, more than $1 million, according to the U.S. Virgin Islands Department of Justice, which entered the filing on Feb. 15.
“Epstein also withdrew more than $775,000 in cash over that time frame from JP Morgan accounts, especially significant as Epstein was known to pay for ‘massages,’ or sexual encounters, in cash,” the filing states. “Financial information also reflects payments drawn from JP Morgan accounts of nearly $1.5 million to known recruiters, including to the MC2 modeling agency, and another $150,000 to a private investigative firm.”
Epstein was facing sex trafficking charges when he died in jail in 2019. New York City’s medical examiner ruled the death a suicide. Epstein had pleaded guilty to soliciting a minor for prostitution in Florida in 2008.
Then-U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General Denise George brought a case against JPMorgan Chase in late 2022, alleging the company helped Epstein carry out crimes including sex trafficking. George was fired shortly after, but the case is moving forward.
The new filing is a less redacted version of the first amended complaint, which had been entered into the docket previously.
‘Extremely High-Risk Client’
Evidence shows JPMorgan officials were aware Epstein was an “extremely high-risk client” but decided to keep servicing his accounts “because of his vast wealth and connections with other high net worth individuals,” according to the complaint.
The company’s global corporate security division, for instance, reviewed media articles that detailed the charges against Epstein in Florida. JPMorgan decided to keep doing business with Epstein, though it did label him as “high risk.”
In a 2010 internal email, the division flagged “new allegations of an investigation related to child trafficking” and wondered, “are you still comfortable with this client who is now a registered sex offender.”
In January 2011, the company’s compliance director asked for reapproval of the relationship due to the new allegations of human trafficking. “I thought we did that in approving a $50 million new line of credit last month?” another employee responded.
A review completed that month led to the conclusion that no “material updates” had been identified. It also noted that Jes Staley, a top JPMorgan official, had spoken with Epstein about the alleged human trafficking. Epstein said there was no truth to the allegations or evidence supporting them.
Just two months later, the security division reported how Epstein had settled a dozen lawsuits with alleged victims and that Epstein was connected to Jean Luc Brunel, owner of the MC2 Model Management agency. The agency received $1 million from Epstein in 2005, according to the vision, which stated, “It is unknown if the money was given as a secret investment or payment for services as a procurer.”
Israeli-Owned Tanker Reportedly Attacked By Iranian Drones In Persian Gulf
Israeli media on Friday revealed a major incident in the Persian Gulf involving an alleged attack on an Israeli owned oil tanker. The BBC’s Persian language service was the first to allude to it, while the Saudi newspaper Elaph also reported it, and the reports indicate it occurred last week but is only now being revealed.
“Foreign officials said on Friday evening that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps launched a Shahed 136-type drone in the Persian Gulf towards the Campo Square oil tanker, which is owned by Israeli businessman Eyal Ofer,” Israel National News Arutz Shevareports.
The tanker sails under the Liberian flag, but Israeli defense officials presented the attack as a retaliation attempt for past alleged Israeli operations against Iran, and described no injuries.
It’s not the first instance of such an alleged Iranian drone operation against tankers in these waters, with a November incident also believed an IRGC military operation to target Israeli shipping.
The Islamic Republic and Israel have long been in a de facto state of war, especially given prior years’ mysterious sabotage incidents of military sites inside Iran, as well as assassinations of top Iranian nuclear scientists.
Concerning the November incident wherein a projectile hit a tanker off the coast of Oman, the AP noted at the time, “While no one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, suspicion immediately fell on Iran. Tehran and Israel have been engaged in a years long shadow war in the wider Middle East, with some drone attacks targeting Israeli-associated vessels traveling around the region.”
Torbjorn Soltvedt, an analyst at the risk intelligence company Verisk Maplecroft, previously explained, “the risk of attacks against shipping and energy infrastructure in the wider region is rising mainly due to the lack of progress in U.S.-Iranian nuclear diplomacy and the decision by Washington to apply further sanctions pressure on Iran.” Soltvedt continued: “Since 2019, Iran has consistently responded to new US sanctions with covert military action in the region.”
#BREAKING: IRGC attacks Liberian-flagged crude oil tanker with suicide drones in Gulf of Oman, Israeli media confirms; “Campo Square” tanker is owned by Israeli businessman Eyal Oferhttps://t.co/gZNPkrxn30
He added: “There is not just an increased risk of disruptive attacks against energy infrastructure in the region, but also a growing risk of a wider military confrontation with more serious consequences for world energy markets.”
TikTok is turning into a major platform for child sexual exploitation in the United States, according to law enforcement officials, with predatory adults increasingly finding it easier to contact and manipulate minors through the Chinese app.
Since the advent of the internet, child predators have had an easy option to get in touch with minors for sexual relationships. However, TikTok is said to be worsening this problem due to its massive popularity among youngsters. Over 50 percent of American minors are estimated to use TikTok at least once every day. “The audience that’s following these children, a lot of them are adult males that have a sexual interest in children,” Jon Rouse, police veteran who heads a group targeting child sex offenders for Interpol, said to The Wall Street Journal.
“Child sex offenders will gravitate toward where there are children. Pedophiles prefer looking at videos,” he added. Billions of videos are uploaded to the app every month, with numerous minors doing all kinds of things, including talking about personal lives.
TikTok officially only allows individuals who are 13 and older to open an account. Users younger than 16 years are also not allowed to use the direct messaging feature which allows people to converse with each other privately. However, children can still falsify their age and gain access to such features.
For instance, Grady Moffett Sr., 42, is currently in a county jail in Fort Worth, Texas, on charges related to alleged sexual assault. He was able to strike up romantic conversations with a 14-year-old girl.
Both of them professed love for each other in public comments at the platform. The duo communicated with each other using TikTok’s direct messaging feature, he admitted to The Wall Street Journal.
The teen girl’s mother said that the situation was “every parent’s nightmare.” The girl told her mother that she loved Moffett because he understood her. “I felt like he kind of groomed her,” the mother told the media outlet.
TikTok’s Failure to Implement Robust Safeguards
Seara Adair, a TikTok content creator, is worried about child sexual content proliferating across the platform. In March last year, Adair was tagged with a video of a pre-teen who was completely naked and doing “inappropriate things,” she said to Forbes.
Adair reported the video for “pornography and nudity.” However, the app later alerted her that “we didn’t find any violations.” This happened despite the fact that TikTok claims as a policy that it has “zero tolerance for child sexual abuse and sexualized content of minors (any person under the age of 18).”
“There’s quite literally accounts that are full of child abuse and exploitation material on their platform, and it’s slipping through their AI,” Adair said.
The Epoch Times has reached out to TikTok for comment.
On TikTok, many teens opt to not make their accounts private in a bid to gather likes. They also use features allowing them to post videos together with strangers side by side.
“You have young kids dancing and showing their lives all over TikTok,” Joseph Scaramucci, a police detective in Waco, Texas, told The Wall Street Journal. “It makes it a one-stop shop for people looking to exploit them.”
Promoting Sexual Content to Kids
In September 2021, The Wall Street Journal published the results of an investigation that used 100 fake TikTok accounts, including 31 accounts registered as users aged 13–15.
The research uncovered that teenage accounts were exposed to over 100 videos from other profiles which recommended porn content. Thousands of videos, which creators had marked adults-only, were also fed into feeds of the teenage accounts.
In an interview with Fox in December, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) called for banning TikTok, pointing out that the app is exposing minors to “violent, depraved, degrading sexual material,” material that Beijing would “never” let Chinese teenagers watch. He also insisted that TikTok is a threat to data security and privacy.
“If you take a step back and look at the bigger picture, why in the world would we allow a Chinese-owned company, which has to answer to the Chinese communists, to be one of the largest media platforms in our country?” Cotton stated.
“Would we ever have allowed Soviet Russia to own a major newspaper or a major broadcast network during the Cold War? Of course, we wouldn’t have.”
Top Pentagon Official Arrives For Rare Tight-Lipped Taiwan Visit
A top Pentagon official has arrived in Taiwan Friday, after departing Mongolia where he was meeting with partner military leaders. Michael Chase is deputy assistant secretary of defense for China, and the Pentagon presented his trip in the context of ongoing “support for Taiwan and military relations with Taiwan” which is in “response to the current threat posed by the People’s Republic of China.”
While dozens of civilian-side admin officials as well as Congressional members have visited the self-ruled island in the past couple years, including a highly provocative visit by then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in August, a visit by a high-ranking Pentagon official remains very rare.
“Chase is the first senior US defense official to travel to the island since the 2019 visit of Heino Klinck, deputy assistant secretary for east Asia, who in turn was the most senior Pentagon official to visit Taiwan in four decades,” writes FT.
Even the Taiwan side has remained tight-lipped about it, with Taiwan’s defense minister Chiu Kuo-cheng saying he would not comment, but only stressing he welcomes anyone friendly to Taiwan who is willing to give “favorable advice” on defense operations.
The defense minister explained, “If any team that is friendly to us want to visit, they will let us know. Suggestions that are beneficial to Taiwan’s defense operations are very good, and they are all good opportunities. Details are not confirmed yet, I will not explain more.” He added: “For some matters, if I am not sure about who my subject is, and I am uncertain about it, I won’t make an explanation before I am officially notified.”
The provocative stopover comes amid the balloon shootdown saga. China has insisted all along that the balloon shot down by a US jet off the South Carolina coast earlier this month was nothing other than a benign weather research vehicle. Beijing has also highlighted that the US routinely sends spy balloons into its airspace, but that it doesn’t result in any dramatic military operations by China to down them.
Beijing in response this week hit America’s top two defense contractors with sanctions: Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, while charging Washington with deliberately exaggerating the ‘balloon threat’.
Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for China Michael Chase, Pentagon’s top China official, has arrived in Taiwan.https://t.co/zUnt9wLczB
A scathing Thursday statement from the Foreign Affairs Committee of the National People’s Congress charged that US lawmakers “took advantage of the issue and fanned the flames, fully exposing their sinister intention to oppose China and contain China.”
Michael Chase’s visit also comes after the Biden administration ramped up weapons deals with Taipei, however, GOP leaders are demanding bigger commitments, also as some reports have said the US is seeking to make Taiwan the “Ukraine of the East.”
One code is for being “unvaccinated for COVID-19.”
That code “may be assigned when the patient has not received at least one dose of any COVID-19 vaccine,” the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which implemented the new codes in 2022, states in a document outlining the codes.
Another code is for being partially vaccinated or having received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine but not having received enough doses to meet the CDC’s definition of fully vaccinated.
The goal of the codes is “to track people who are not immunized or only partially immunized,” according to the CDC.
Experts say the codes don’t fit with the International Classification of Diseases, which has diagnoses for diseases and reasons for health care visits.
“They’re treating nonvaccination as if this is a hazardous exposure that therefore merits being recorded as a medical exposure,” Dr. Harvey Risch, professor emeritus of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, told The Epoch Times. “That’s never been done to my knowledge.”
The CDC did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
Proposal
The CDC proposed adding the codes to the international classification in September 2021.
“People have now been having immunizations for a number of months, and these provide protection for people who are immunized, but there has been interest expressed in being able to track people who are not immunized or who are only partially immunized,” Dr. David Berglund, a CDC medical officer, said during a meeting that went over the proposal.
“At the current time, there can be considered to be a significant modifiable risk factor for morbidity and for mortality and it can be of interest for clinical reasons, as well as being a value for public health reasons, to be able to track this.”
COVID-19 hospitalization and death rates are higher among the unvaccinated, according to data published by the CDC. The data do not take into account key factors such as age or prior infection, and other figures show the vaccinated being hospitalized or dying at higher rates in some states.
The proposal was backed by meeting participants during the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision (ICD-10) Coordination and Maintenance Committee meeting.
“I definitely think we would support this,” Kristin Balint, a supervisor at Trinity Health, said. “We are currently seeing physicians documenting unimmunized for COVID-19 in our records.”
Jeanne Yoder, representing the Defense Health Agency, envisioned adding additional codes later to indicate if a person was not vaccinated against each successive variant.
The organizations of the people who backed the proposal either did not respond to requests for comment or declined inquiries.
Codes Added
Three codes were added to the classification system on April 1, 2022.
Z28.310 is for being unvaccinated. Z28.311 is for being partially vaccinated. Z28.39 is for “other underimmunization status.” All fell under a new sub-sub category, “Underimmunization for COVID-19 status.”
Four US Troops Wounded In Raid On ISIS Commander’s Syrian Hideout
The Pentagon has announced that on Thursday US special forces conducted a raid that resulted in the killing of a senior ISIS leader, identified as Hamza al-Homsi.
But crucially and in a rare instance for such operations in the country, four American troops were wounded, along with a working dog, a military statement indicated.
An official statement from Tampa-based US Central Command (CENTCOM) described that “Last night, during a partnered U.S. and Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) helicopter raid in northeastern Syria, an explosion on target resulted in four U.S. servicemembers and one working dog wounded.”
“The targeted ISIS senior leader, Hamza al-Homsi, was killed,” it confirmed. “The U.S. servicemembers and working dog are receiving treatment in a U.S. medical facility in Iraq.”
Separately CENTCOM announced in a tweet that a prior Feb.10 raid had killed “Ibrahim Al Qahtani, an ISIS official associated with planning ISIS detention center attacks.”
That raid had further “resulted in the seizure of multiple weapons, ammo, and a suicide belt,” according to the tweet.
The United States has sought to justify its continued occupation of northeast Syria, including valuable oil and gas fields, as part of a ‘counter-ISIS’ mission, and conducts these raids from time to time. However, Damascus and Moscow have charged that the US presence is all about stealing Syrian energy, blocking resources from the population.
ISIS official involved in planning prison breaks killed by US and coalition forces in Syria, CENTCOM says https://t.co/gwsdzm7b4O
While little is known about Hamza al-Homsi, the other terrorist killed, Qahtani, is believed to have been behind several prison breaks freeing ISIS and other jihadist fighters. “So far, we have prevented ISIS from freeing these fighters. But there are a range of detention facilities in northeast Syria, and we know they will try to attack them again,” Ian Moss, the Deputy Coordinator for Countering Violent Extremism and Terrorist Detentions, has previously said.
