America is launching a “large scale” series of air and artillery strikes in central Syria in retaliation to last week’s killing of two members of the Iowa national guard and a civilian interpreter, and injuring three other service members near the city of Palmyra.   

American F-15 and A-10 warplanes, Apache attack helicopters and Himars rockets were used at the launch of the operation. As a gesture to the state that fielded the killed national guardsmen, the operation is named  “Hawkeye Strike.” The Friday strikes seemed to start a large-scale campaign against the Islamic State in Syria. 

 “This is not the beginning of a war, it is a declaration of vengeance,” the secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, wrote on X. “As we said directly following the savage attack, if you target Americans — anywhere in the world — you will spend the rest of your brief, anxious life knowing the United States will hunt you, find you, and ruthlessly kill you.” Today, he added, “we hunted and we killed our enemies. Lots of them. And we will continue.”

American “forces have commenced a large-scale strike against ISIS infrastructure and weapons sites in Syria,” the Tampa-based U.S. Central Command writes in its X account. “This massive strike follows the attack on U.S. and partner forces in Syria on December 13. We will provide additional information soon.”

The strikes follow President Trump’s vow last Sunday that  those behind the Saturday shooting at a meeting to strategize the renewed war on the Islamic State will incur “a lot of damage.” Mr. Trump said at the time that ISIS perpetrated the attack, and that the government of the acting Syrian president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, “had nothing to do” with it. 

Yet a spokesman for the interior ministry at Damascus, Nour al-Din al-Baba, acknowledged that the unidentified gunman who shot the servicemen was a member of the Syrian national army. He added that the authorities planned to “reassign” the man on Sunday for holding “extremist” ideas.

Reports from officials at Damascus and Washington claimed the gunman had recently joined ISIS. Other reports, though, tied him to a general in the Syrian military who is a member of Mr. Sharaa’s inner circles. Many in the Syrian military’s upper echelons are veterans of the now defunct local Al Qaeda branch, known as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. That group’s top commander was Abu Mohammed al Joulani, which was President Sharaa’s nom de guerre. 

As the Damascus government struggles to maintain authority across the country, remnants of the Islamic State are regrouping and trying to capture parts of the area around Palmyra and near the border with Iraq. The Friday strikes seemed designed to set back that resurgence.

Success, though, could be hampered by the fact that the military, a ragtag group of former Syrian armed gangs, as well as the top generals around Mr. Sharaa, fought for a decade on behalf of a militant Islamist ideology that differs only little from that of ISIS.