A service member from the U.S.-led, counter-ISIS coalition was killed during a flurry of operations in the region over the past week, Central Command officials announced Monday. It’s unclear just yet who perished and where they’re from. Two others in the coalition were also wounded, and they are “from two different nations,” according to CENTCOM, which insisted, “There were no injuries to U.S. personnel or damage to U.S. equipment.”
Locations included the Hamrin mountains of Iraq and around Deir ez-Zor, Syria in a series of raids spanning December 30 and January 6. It’s also unclear how many suspected terrorists were killed in the operations. However, CENTCOM said its combined forces captured an “ISIS attack cell leader” during an overnight raid in Syria late last week.
“During the operations, ISIS fighters engaged coalition forces on several occasions,” CENTCOM said. Those engagements resulted in coalition airstrikes “using F-16s, F-15s, and A-10s,” the latter of which were “successful in eliminating the ISIS fighters within a cave,” according to CENTCOM.
Developing: Iran’s military has withdrawn most of its forces from Syria, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, citing U.S., European and Arab officials. Perhaps most importantly for U.S. and allied forces in the region, “Members of Iran’s elite Quds Force have now fled to Iran and the militia groups have disbanded,” a U.S. official claimed.
However, Iranian forces “could find a way back in thanks to sectarian divisions that remain largely unresolved under the new regime,” Andrew Tabler, a former director for Syria at the National Security Council, warned.
Turkey’s leader is watching Syria’s future nervously, just in case the Kurdish population attempts to negotiate any new divisions of Syria, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Monday. “We can not accept under any pretext that Syria be divided and if we notice the slightest risk we will take the necessary measures,” Erdogan said, adding, “we have the means” and “we could intervene in one night,” he warned. Agence France-Presse has a bit more.
Get a clearer picture of “How Iran moves sanctioned oil around the world” thanks to an intriguing multimedia report published Tuesday by Reuters. The news agency tracked several shipments from an Iranian import-export firm known as Sahara Thunder beginning in February 2022. (The U.S. sanctioned the Iranian “front company” in April.)
Background: “Reuters shared its reporting with Roke Intelligence, a part of British research and development firm Roke which specialises in monitoring sanctions evasion for clients in the maritime industry. It independently verified many of the findings, located ships with satellite imaging, found the likely offloading points for vessels, and identified manipulated vessel tracking data.”
Among their findings: “There were 92 owner or operating companies for the 34 ships involved with Sahara Thunder’s activities,” Reuters reports. The news agency says it “contacted 79 of them and was unable to reach 13. Ten companies replied. Eight said they were not involved. Two said they only handled the ships’ technical management and had no knowledge of chartering or voyages.” Read the rest, here.
Related: A key Chinese port that handles oil from U.S.-sanctioned countries has agreed to bar tankers from sanctioned companies. “Shandong Port said it expects the shipping ban to have a limited impact on independent refiners as most of the sanctioned oil is being carried on non-sanctioned tankers,” Reuters reports.
Welcome to this Tuesday edition of The D Brief, brought to you by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. Share your newsletter tips, reading recommendations, or feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 2015, two al-Qaeda terrorists attacked the French satirical weekly magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris, killing 12 people and wounding 11 others before authorities tracked them down and killed them two days later.
Around DOD
New details emerge on proposed fast, runway-independent aircraft. Aurora Flight Sciences and Bell Textron are the two contractors racing to complete designs for the SPRINT program, a DARPA-SOCOM search for aircraft that can both hover and cruise faster than 400 knots. Aurora says it’s planning a demonstrator with a 45-ft wingspan and 1,000-pound payload whose blended wing and embedded lift fans will enable speeds of 450 knots. Bell Textron, meanwhile, says it has completed wind-tunnel tests of its Stop/Fold rotors that are to lift its aircraft off the ground, then fold back to allow a faster propulsion system to take over. Read, here.
More than 800 “potential vulnerabilities and biases” found in DOD’s proposed AI-infused medical services. A Pentagon red team that included more than 200 people—including DOD clinical providers and healthcare analysts within the department—looked at “three popular LLMs” that might be used to summarize clinical notes and drive a medical advisory chatbot. Their work to build a list of potential problems will guide future efforts to procure and build AI-based tools, according to a release from the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office, or CDAO. Read more, here.
“Murder Hornet” is official. Last year, the Navy ordered a crash program to outfit Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornets with nine air-to-air missiles: five AIM-120s, four AIM-9Xs, and an ATFLIR targeting pod. The upgunned aircraft made its combat debut last May in the battles against Houthi forces targeting shipping in the Red Sea. Crews dubbed it the “Murder Hornet” after a particularly ferocious wasp, and it’s now the Navy’s official name for the variant, The War Zone reported Monday.
How should Boeing fix itself? Wall Street Journal: “We asked dozens of people—current and former Boeing leaders, airline executives, employees, suppliers, safety regulators and others—in recent months what Boeing should do to turn itself around. Here’s what they said.” More, here.
China
Tencent, CATL added to U.S. list of Chinese firms that allegedly help Beijing’s military. Both are behemoths; Tencent is a tech conglomerate that includes the world’s biggest videogame company, while Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. “accounts for 35 percent of global lithium-ion battery production,” as Defense One reported earlier this year.
Reuters: “While the designation does not involve immediate bans, it can be a blow to the reputations of affected companies and represents a stark warning to U.S. entities and firms about the risks of conducting business with them. It could also add pressure on the U.S. Treasury Department to sanction the companies.”
ICYMI: A year ago, Congress ordered the Pentagon to stop buying batteries from CATL. But with battery-powered military gear only set to grow, replacing Chinese sources is more easily said than done, Thomas Corbett and Peter Singer noted in May.
GAO wonders: What would it cost to replace U.S. telecoms’ China-linked gear? With Salt Typhoon still unpurged from U.S. systems, the Government Accountability Office may try to put a price tag on one immensely complicated countermeasure: replacing Chinese-made gear in many of smaller U.S. telecoms. Read on, here.
Europe and Russia
Better late than never: The Brits just launched a UK-led, AI-driven system to “track threats to undersea infrastructure and monitor Russian shadow fleet,” the Defense Ministry said Monday.
Ten nations are involved with a focus across 22 regions, “including parts of the English Channel, North Sea, Kattegat, and Baltic Sea,” 10 Downing Street said. The alliance includes Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Netherlands, Sweden, and of course the UK.
“Harnessing the power of AI, this UK-led system is a major innovation which allows us the unprecedented ability to monitor large areas of the sea with a comparatively small number of resources, helping us stay secure at home and strong abroad,” British Defense Secretary John Healey said in a statement. Read more, here.
And lastly: Denmark’s king just changed the nation’s coat of arms. The new coat “more prominently feature[s] Greenland and the Faroe Islands – in what has also been seen as a rebuke to Donald Trump,” the Guardian reported Sunday.
Some history: “For 500 years, previous Danish royal coats of arms have featured three crowns, the symbol of the Kalmar Union between Denmark, Norway and Sweden, which was led from Denmark between 1397 and 1523. They are also an important symbol of its neighbour Sweden,” Miranda Bryant of the Guardian writes. “But in the updated version, the crowns have been removed and replaced with a more prominent polar bear and ram than previously, to symbolise Greenland and the Faroe Islands respectively.”
By the way: Donald Trump Jr. flew to Greenland Tuesday for a five-hour visit to record a podcast, AP reports. “In a statement, Greenland’s government said Trump Jr.’s visit would take place ‘as a private individual’ and not as an official visit and that Greenlandic representatives would not meet with him.”
“Neither Trump Jr.’s delegation nor Greenlandic government officials had requested a meeting,” a Greenland official told AP. Read more, here.
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