Four strikes hit an air base in Idlib and the US envoy calls them an unnecessary escalation
The first reports named no attacker; the attribution to Israel arrived in a statement from Washington, which said it was deeply concerned by the raid on a base last struck under the old government.
Tom Barrack, the US special presidential envoy for Syria and Iraq, said Israel's strikes on Abu al-Duhur, a military airfield in the northwest of Syria, were an "unnecessary escalation" that does nothing to advance stability in the region.
He wrote on X that Washington was deeply concerned by the attacks and was encouraging every party to choose "logical discourse" over further military incidents.
Al Jazeera had reported earlier on Tuesday that four air strikes hit the airport, which lies in the eastern countryside of Idlib in the north of the country. That account named no attacker. It described the raid as the first of its kind on the base since the fall of the Assad government in December 2024.
Neither account gave a casualty figure or set out what was damaged on the ground.
The unusual element is where the objection came from. A serving US envoy named Israel as the party responsible at a point when the first reports of the strikes had assigned them to no one, and did so in the language of a complaint rather than a note of concern between allies.