13 February 2018
A US air and
artillery strike has killed Russian combatants in the first lethal violence in
Syria between the two nuclear powers, according to sources on both sides.
The battle, which
was briefly alluded to in a US-led coalition statement last week, took place in
the oil-rich Deir Ezzor province in eastern Syria.
On 7 February, a
large force loyal to Bashar al-Assad and supported by tanks and artillery
advanced and fired at a Syrian Democratic Forces base manned by Kurdish troops
and American military advisors, a US military spokesman said in a statement to
Bloomberg on Tuesday.
The United
States, which was communicating with the Russian side during the clash, drove
the attackers back with aircraft and artillery fire, suffering no fatalities,
the spokesman said.
On 10 February, a
US drone destroyed an advancing Russian-made T-72 tank from the “same hostile
force,” the US military said on Tuesday.
While reports
have varied widely, claiming anywhere from a handful to more than a hundred
Russians were killed and describing them alternately as military troops or
private contractors, the 7 February clash nonetheless appears to have been the
deadliest between US and Russian citizens since the Cold War.
On Monday, the
Russia-based independent research group Conflict Intelligence Team published
the names of four Russians who had been killed by the US strike. It said the
men were mercenaries from the Wagner group, a highly secretive private military
company whose alleged commander was photographed with Vladimir Putin in 2016.
Friends and
relatives confirmed to RBC newspaper that the men had been killed in Syria on 7
February. Conflict Intelligence Team told The Telegraph on Tuesday that three
other Russians were also killed in the attack, which it said was the only time
Russians had been killed by the Western coalition.
The independent newspaper
Novaya Gazeta reported that 13 Russians had been killed and 15 wounded in the
strike. It said Wagner troops had been operating with a special forces unit
known as the “ISIS Hunters”.
Igor Strelkov, a
nationalist with links to Russian intelligence who commanded Russia-backed
separatists in eastern Ukraine, said 100 Wagner employees had died in the
strike.
Bloomberg quoted
Russian sources as saying that 200 professional soldiers, most of them Russian,
were killed, while an American official told the publication about 100 had been
killed.
If true, those
numbers would easily eclipse previous Russian losses in Syria, which has been
presented by Mr Putin as a largely bloodless conflict. Russia has insisted it
does not have troops on the ground even as reports have mounted of small
numbers of soldiers and mercenaries killed.
Surveys have
shown Russians are largely lukewarm toward the Syrian conflict.
In other
circumstances, such a clash would have likely sparked a diplomatic crisis, but
the Kremlin did not appear to want to discuss possible casualties before Mr
Putin stands for re-election next month.
After liberal
presidential candidate Grigory Yavlinsky called on the president to comment on
the Russian deaths, Mr Putin's spokesman said these reports “need verification”
and argued that so many Russians were located in so many countries it was
“difficult to have any detailed information”.
In a statement
last week, the defence ministry said no Russian soldiers were in that area of
Deir Ezzor and claimed that the US strike had hit Syrian rebels by mistake,
injuring 25 of them.
“If public
opinion paints a picture for itself that the Syrian war will require losses and
those to blame are not terrorists but American soldiers, then they will have to
react, and no one wants to react to this right now,” said Carnegie Centre
Moscow analyst Alexander Baunov.
The clashes in
Deir Ezzor bode ill for the future of the war, suggesting that conflicts
between the many regional powers present in Syria could grow more frequent even
as the terrorists are defeated.
“The fight with
the Islamic State is being replaced by old and new conflicts amid the
intersection of internal and external players' interests,” said Conflict
Intelligence Team researcher Ruslan Leviev.
Alec Luhn
