The Weapons America Is Leaving Behind in Syria

Army Colonel Myles Caggins, a spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition in Syria and Iraq, tried to play the incident off as routine, saying that “blowing the ammo was part of the plan,” but Brett McGurk, a former U.S. envoy to the multinational alliance, tweeted that the mission constituted an “emergency ‘break glass’ evacuation procedure reserved for an extreme worst-case scenario.”

McGurk isn’t wrong. “Trying to destroy munitions from the sky like this does not work as well as air planners think,” John Ismay, a New York Times reporter and former Navy explosive ordnance disposal officer, tweeted. “Some of the weapons you hit will detonate sympathetically, sure. For the rest, you’ve blown open secure storage and made it available to anyone with a pickup truck.”