Anti regime activists on the ground in Syria said the strikes seemed to have been targeted precisely.
“They are accurate but they were fierce, in comparison to those that were being carried out by the Assad regime,” activist Assi al Hussein, who was in the town of Albu Kamal on the Iraqi border, told AFP via the Internet.
Abu Yusef, an activist in Raqa, said one of the strikes had hit a suspected arms depot in the city’s ex-governorate building, which IS has used as its headquarters for many months, causing “a big fire and explosions”.
The new strikes came less than two weeks after US President Barack Obama warned that he had approved an expansion of the campaign against the IS group to include action in Syria.
US officials have said the goal of the strikes is to degrade the group’s capabilities so it can be taken on by local ground forces including the Iraqi army and moderate Syrian rebels, who are to be trained and equipped by the coalition.
Syria’s opposition National Coalition welcomed the new raids, but urged sustained pressure on Assad’s government.
“The international community has joined our fight against ISIS in Syria,” Coalition president Hadi al-Bahra said, using an alternative acronym for the jihadist group.
“We are calling on all our partners to maintain pressure on the Assad regime,” Bahra said. “This war cannot be won by military means alone.”
– France vows no hostage talks –
The raids came hours after Algerian group Jund al-Khilifa (Soldiers of the Caliphate) posted a video showing the white haired and bespectacled French hostage, Herve Pierre Gourdel, squatting on the ground flanked by two hooded men clutching Kalashnikov assault rifles.
In the footage, confirmed by Paris as authentic, the group gave France 24 hours to halt its air strikes in Iraq, saying that it was responding to an IS call to kill Westerners whose nations are among 50 countries that have joined the campaign to battle the jihadist group.
Prime Minister Manuel Valls told French radio there would be “no discussion, no negotiation” with the Algerian group and stressed Paris would continue its air strikes.
In a separate incident on Tuesday, Israel downed a Syrian fighter jet over the Golan Heights, indicating that it had crossed a ceasefire line into the Israeli occupied sector.
Israeli army radio said it was apparently a MiG-21 fighter jet which was shot down by a surface-to-air Patriot missile, with the wreckage landing on the Syrian controlled side of the plateau.
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