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Bahrain, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates took part in the strikes, U.S. officials said, although the Arab governments were not expected to announce their participation until later Tuesday. The new coalition’s makeup is significant because the United States was able to recruit Sunni governments to take action against the Sunni militants of the Islamic State. The operation also unites the squabbling states of the Persian Gulf.

The strikes came less than two weeks after Obama announced in an address to the nation that he was authorizing an expansion of the military campaign against the Islamic State.

Unlike U.S. strikes in Iraq over the past month, which have been small-bore bombings of mostly individual Islamic State targets – patrol boats and trucks – the salvo on Tuesday in Syria was the beginning of what was expected to be a sustained, hours-long bombardment at targets in the militant headquarters in Raqqa and on the border.

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The strikes began after years of debate within the Obama administration about whether the United States should intervene militarily or should avoid another entanglement in a complex war in the Middle East. But the Islamic State controls a broad swath of land across both Iraq and Syria.

Defence officials said the goal of the air campaign was to deprive the Islamic State of the safe havens it enjoys in Syria. The administration’s ultimate goal, as set forth in the address Obama delivered on Sept. 10, is to recruit a global coalition to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the militants, even as Obama warned that “eradicating a cancer” like the Islamic State was a long-term challenge that would put some U.S. troops at risk.