The US led coalition is taking responsibility for air strikes that killed 83 Syrian soldiers and wounded 120 others in Deir al-Zour. A spokesman for the US administration acknowledged that US coalition forces were responsible for the attacks on the Syrian soldiers, expressing “regret” for the “unintentional loss of life”.
The attack jeopardizes the fragile ceasefire established less than a week ago and calls into question just how closely US forces are coordinating with the Russians in their war against ISIS and other extremist militias operating in Syria. Pentagon officials claimed they thought the Syrian soldiers were members of ISIS and that their location was an ISIS tank position.
Russian officials immediately responded to the US acknowledgment of the error by criticizing the coalition for not coordinating their actions with them. Killing nearly a hundred Syrian soldiers during a ceasefire is bad enough, but losing the significant military gains achieved by the Syrian army is even more tragic.
The Syrian troops had been defending the area from ISIS, who seized the opportunity after the strike to advance past the bombed Syrian base and closer to the area’s Deir Ezzor airport. The US strike may have given ISIS what years of offensives could not; possible control of the strategic airport that, if lost, could grant ISIS solid control of the eastern part of the country.
The bombing certainly highlights the increasing difficulty of understanding what the true objective of US policy is in the area. If it is to destroy ISIS then fuller and more complete cooperation with Russia–who shares the same goal–would make more sense. Had the US done so before today’s strike, this tragic loss of life could have been averted and ISIS would not be advancing and moving closer to taking over the area’s airport.
In light of the US acknowledgment that they did, in fact, commit this horrible act of negligence, it raises further questions of just how poor their intelligence on the ground there is or how incompetent those running the US bombing operations in Syria are.
With all of the high-tech satellite imagery along with other regional intelligence readily available to the US, one does wonder how it could have possibly made this mistake. But even if such intelligence was lacking and the satellite images were not as clear as they should have been, a simple phone call to their Russian counterparts would have been enough to avert this costly error.
But for whatever reason–anti-Russian ideology, professional rivalry, or simply shoddy workmanship and laziness–that phone call was never made. As a result, we are now left asking ourselves what really are the true objectives of US policy in Syria. The cynics among us might begin to believe that the real objectives have more to do with removing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad from Damascus and pushing back Russian influence in the region.
But such an objective comes at a heavy cost. It means allowing ISIS and other extremist militias in the region to continue their orgy of violence and wreak even more havoc on the poor innocents of Syria and Iraq. If the US truly wants to win the war against ISIS and its allies, it must put aside its differences with Russia, join forces with them, and work together to eradicate this plague that continues to spread across the region.
Very good article