The United Arab Emirates on Tuesday launched a series of airstrikes in Syria, returning to combat missions against the Islamic State for the first time since December.
A squadron of Emirati F-16 fighters struck Islamic State targets in Syria in the early hours and returned safely to a base in Jordan, the Emirates’ armed forces announced.
In an interview, Yousef Al Otaiba, the Emirates’ ambassador to the United States, said that the United States had addressed Emirati concerns that it did not have enough resources in place in northern Iraq to rescue downed pilots.
“The suspension of combat operations was made for purely operational and planning reasons, not political ones,” Mr. Otaiba said. “Once those concerns were addressed, combat operations resumed.”
He added that the Emirates were “fully committed” to defeating the Sunni extremists of the Islamic State “and will not back down.”
The return of the Emirates, a key Arab ally in the coalition against the Islamic State, is a boost to the American-led coalition after a tense six weeks in which a Jordanian pilot was captured by the Islamic State and later burned alive. That elicited a fierce response from Jordan, which executed two people linked to the Islamic State and launched a series of airstrikes.
The Islamic State also made an uncorroborated claim that those strikes killed the last American hostage held in Syria.
The Emirates suspended their combat missions over concerns that the United States Central Command had not deployed sufficient resources to northern Iraq — specifically Erbil, closer to the battleground — to rescue downed pilots. Aircraft for such missions were based farther south, in Kuwait.
American military officials maintained that Islamic State fighters had captured the Jordanian pilot, First Lt. Moaz al-Kasasbeh, within minutes after his plane went down, and said search teams did not have enough time to locate him. A senior military official said that Lieutenant Kasasbeh’s parachute had been spotted quickly by the militants, and that he had landed in their midst.
But his capture raised questions about whether rescue teams would have been able to get to Lieutenant Kasasbeh within the so-called golden hour, after which chances of survival from a crash drop sharply. When Emirates officials discovered that most of the rescue teams and aircraft were based in Kuwait, they said that their pilots would not fly until there was a system in place for more rapid search and rescue.
Last week, the Central Command notified Emirati officials that they had sent additional rescue helicopters to Erbil.
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