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U.S. Likely To Deploy Avenger Air Defense Systems In Syria And Iraq To Combat Drones

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The mobile short-range AN/TWQ-1 Avenger air defense missile system is probably the best readily available system for protecting U.S. troops in Syria and Iraq from the growing threat posed to them by enemy drones. 

In late February, photos purportedly showing Avengers being transported on a highway from Iraq to Syria emerged on social media. They were likely being brought to U.S. troops in Syria’s eastern Deir ez-Zor region. 

With its FIM-92 Stinger missile launchers, the Avenger is designed for protecting infantry against low-flying aircraft, cruise missiles, helicopters, and drones.

Until early last year, bases hosting U.S. troops in Iraq had no air defense systems. Their vulnerability was demonstrated when Iran attacked two of them with ballistic missiles in January 2020, in a retaliatory strike for the U.S. assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in a drone strike. The U.S. has since deployed high-altitude MIM-104 Patriot missiles to these bases alongside short-range C-RAM (Counter-rocket, artillery, and mortar) systems. 

However, the Avenger is arguably a much more suitable system for providing ground forces protection against drones.

In early 2020, U.S. troops deployed in Deir ez-Zor’s oil fields were targeted by improvised drones capable of dropping small mortars, munitions which were apparently made using a 3D printer. While they failed to kill or injure anyone they, nevertheless, demonstrated the nature of this new threat U.S. troops now have to deal with.

The Avenger could provide ground forces in that area with some much-needed protection against such airborne threats as well as bolster those above-mentioned air defenses, which are primarily designed for countering ballistic missiles and small rockets, in Iraq. 


In recent years, there has been an enormous rise in the proliferation of increasingly deadlier and more sophisticated drones by powerful non-state actors in Syria and Iraq. The notorious Islamic State (ISIS) group previously showcased its ability to transform relatively simple commercially available drones into small bombers. Had its self-styled caliphate, which once spanned vast swathes of Iraq and Syria, survived a little longer, the group might well have been able to develop more advanced drones that could’ve posed a much greater threat to U.S. and allied troops. And that threat could’ve been especially grave if those forces weren’t equipped with short-range mobile air defense systems like the Avenger. 

For example, evidence recently emerged that ISIS was developing a jet-powered drone that roughly resembled the infamous V-1 cruise missiles that Nazi Germany terrorized London with during the latter stages of the Second World War. 

When the Iraqi city of Mosul, the largest city ISIS ever annexed into its self-styled caliphate, was finally liberated in 2017, following a bloody and exhaustive urban battle waged by U.S.-backed Iraqi troops, a “fully constructed pulse jet engine” was found. That showed just how close ISIS had come to potentially deploying such a weapon. 


Today, Iran-backed Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria are rapidly gaining the capability to develop and operate weaponized drones. A drone strike against the royal palace in Saudi Arabia’s capital Riyadh in late February was reportedly carried out from Iraq. An anonymous Iraqi militia official revealed that these suicide drones came “in parts from Iran and were assembled in Iraq, and were launched from Iraq.” 

Tehran is, more likely than not, passing on the capability and knowhow to its vast network of Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria to build and operate such drones, giving these groups a new, and potentially lethal, way to threaten U.S. troops. 

At least one of these militias had previously expressed its plans to develop the capability to manufacture such drones independently. 

“We are working day and night to develop drones that can be put together in a living room,” said Abu Alaa al-Walai, the leader of the Iran-backed Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada group in a 2019 interview

U.S. deployment of Avenger systems in Syria, and likely Iraq too in the near future, show how Washington is gradually coming to terms with the evolving nature of the threat posed by this dramatic proliferation of armed drones. How ground troops are deployed and equipped from now on will have to factor in the threats posed by these weapons.

This is not wholly unlike how the U.S. military had to devise new ways to handle the constant threat posed to troops by improvised explosive devices (IEDs). 

“While 15 years ago, the main threat for countries and populations was that of improvised explosive devices that could be remotely activated with only a mobile phone, today these IEDs can be flown towards the target of choice to enhance their impact and effectiveness,” Mauro Gilli, a senior researcher at the Center for Security Studies at Polytechnic of Zurich, recently told Al Jazeera

In the early years of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. Humvees proved highly vulnerable to IEDs and roadside bombs planted by insurgents, which resulted in many U.S. casualties. Having learned from this dire experience, the U.S. developed much larger heavily armored Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected (MRAP) vehicles to provide its troops with much more adequate protection from those threats. 

In the near future, similar innovations may need to be devised to defend against the threat of, as Gilli aptly put it, what essentially amount to airborne IEDs. The deployment of Avengers in Syria and Iraq may well, retrospectively, prove to be the first step toward addressing and combating this rapidly growing threat.