U.S. bombing al Qaeda in Syria again

BEIRUT -- An airstrike carried out by the U.S.-led coalition overnight targeted a town controlled by al Qaeda militants in northwestern Syria, the U.S. military and Syrian activists said Wednesday.

The strike hit a storage facility near the town of Harem, U.S. Central Command said in a statement. It was one of five airstrikes conducted by the coalition in Syria since Monday, the military said.

It is the fourth time that American aircraft have targeted al Qaeda militants in the U.S.-led coalition's broader aerial campaign against the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq (ISIS).

As in the past, when striking areas controlled by the al Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front, the Pentagon was careful to specify that members of the so-called Khorasan group were the intended target. Khorasan is a special cell of al Qaeda operatives that overlaps with the Nusra Front and is plotting attacks against Western interests, according to the military.

"These strikes were not in response to the Nusrah Front's clashes with the Syrian moderate opposition, and they did not target the Nusrah Front as a whole," Centcom said in a statement.

Inside Syria, however, activists and rebels dismiss the U.S. attempt to distinguish between the Khorasan group and Nusra, saying they are one entity. Many analysts also question the distinction.

While the strike's success was still being determined, the Pentagon said there were "initial indications that it resulted in the intended effects by striking terrorists and destroying or severely damaging several Khorasan Group vehicles and buildings assessed to be meeting and staging areas, IED-making facilities and training facilities."

Harem is considered a strategically important border town, because it lies on a chief smuggling route to Turkey from northwestern Syria. The strike also was reported by local activists and the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The Observatory said the strike killed two Nusra Front fighters.

The U.S. says it isn't coordinating its aerial operation in Syria with President Bashar Assad, whose own air force has been pummeling opposition-held areas from the sky since the international coalition's campaign began in late September.

The Observatory said Wednesday that Syrian aircraft have carried out nearly 1,600 airstrikes since Oct. 20. It said at least 396 people, including 109 children, have been killed in those strikes.

On Wednesday, a government strike hit the northeastern city of Raqqa, controlled by ISIS, killing at least nine people, the Observatory and local activist Fourat Alwfaa said. Alwfaa said the killed were civilians.

Another strike hit the town of al-Hara in southern Syria, killing eight people, including four children and a woman, the Observatory said. An activist group in Daraa also reported the strikes, but offered no casualty figures.

Recent reports suggested that Nusra and ISIS leaders had decided to work together on the battlefield in Syria, but while the groups share a common jihadist ideology, they have fought each other viciously for territory this year and the head of U.S. intelligence questioned the likelihood of a meaningful partnership.

"There have been tactical accommodations on the battlefield, on occasion, where local groups have united in the interest of a tactical objective," Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said in a rare interview with "Face the Nation" moderator Bob Schieffer. "But broadly, I don't see those two uniting, at least yet."