FIRST US TROOPS KILLED IN SYRIA IN A YEAR
The incident is the primary of its sort reported since Islamist-led forces overthrew longtime Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad in December final 12 months, and rekindled the nation’s ties with the US.
Syrian state information company SANA, quoting a safety supply, earlier reported that a number of US troops and two Syrian service members had been wounded within the assault.
The troopers have been collaborating in a “joint subject tour” in Palmyra, which was as soon as underneath the management of the Islamic State group, SANA reported.
Most of the metropolis’s famend ruins, a UNESCO World Heritage Website, have been destroyed when the Islamic State group managed the world a decade in the past.
A Syrian army official who requested anonymity mentioned that the photographs have been fired “throughout a gathering between Syrian and American officers” at a Syrian base in Palmyra.
A witness, who requested to stay nameless, mentioned he heard the photographs coming from inside the bottom.
Nonetheless, a Pentagon official talking on the situation of anonymity advised AFP that the assault “passed off in an space the place the Syrian President doesn’t have management.”
“POSSIBLE IS INFILTRATION”
In an interview on state tv, Syrian Inside Ministry spokesman Anwar al-Baba mentioned there had been “prior warnings from the inner safety command to allied forces within the desert area” of a possible Islamic State “infiltration”.
“The worldwide coalition forces didn’t take the Syrian warnings of a potential IS infiltration into consideration,” he mentioned.
Based on the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor, which has a large community of sources inside Syria, the assembly got here as a part of an “American technique to strengthen its presence and foothold within the Syrian desert”.
SANA reported that helicopters had evacuated the wounded to the Al-Tanf base in southern Syria, the place US troops are deployed as a part of the Washington-led world coalition in opposition to the Islamic State group.
Final month, throughout Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s historic go to to Washington, Damascus formally joined the coalition.
Islamic State seized swathes of Syrian and Iraqi territory in 2014 throughout Syria’s civil conflict, earlier than being territorially defeated within the nation 5 years later.
Its fighters, nonetheless, nonetheless keep a presence, notably in Syria’s huge desert.
US forces are deployed in Syria’s Kurdish-controlled northeast in addition to at Al-Tanf close to the border with Jordan.
