NEW YORK, Nov 10: The US military conducted nearly a dozen secret operations against Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups in Syria, Pakistan and other countries since 2004, The New York Times reported on Monday.

Quoting anonymous US officials, the Times said the operations were authorised by a broad classified order that then-Defence Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld signed and President George W. Bush approved in spring 2004. The order authorised the military to attack Al Qaeda anywhere in the world and to conduct operations in countries that were not at war with the US.

One such operation was this year’s Oct 26 raid inside Syria, the Times reported.

Washington has not formally acknowledged the raid, but US officials have said the target was a top Al Qaeda-in-Iraq figure.

In another mission, in 2006, Navy Seals raided a suspected terrorist compound in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

The raids have typically been conducted by US Special Forces, often in conjunction with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the newspaper said.

Even though the process has been streamlined, specific missions have to be approved by the defence secretary or, in the cases of Syria and Pakistan, by the president.

The newspaper said that Navy Seals raided a suspected militants’ compound in the Bajaur region, according to a former top official of the CIA.

Officials watched the entire mission — captured by video camera of a remotely piloted Predator aircraft — in real time in the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center (CTC) at the agency’s headquarters in Virginia 7,000 miles away.

Some of the military missions have been conducted in close coordination with the CIA, according to senior American officials, who said that in others, like the special operations raid in Syria, the military commandos acted in support of CIA-directed operations.

But as many as a dozen additional operations were cancelled in the past four years, often to the dismay of military commanders, senior military officials said.

They said senior administration officials had decided in these cases that the missions were too risky, were too diplomatically explosive or relied on insufficient evidence.

More than a half dozen officials, including current and former military and intelligence officials as well as senior Bush administration policy makers, described details of the 2004 military order on the condition of anonymity because of its politically delicate nature.

Spokesmen for the White House, the Defence Department and the military declined to comment.

Apart from the 2006 raid into Pakistan, the American officials refused to describe in detail what they said had been nearly a dozen previously undisclosed attacks, except to say they had been carried out in Syria, Pakistan and other countries.

They made clear that there had been no raids into Iran using that authority, but they suggested that American forces had carried out reconnaissance missions in Iran using other classified directives.