Attacker who killed US troops in Syria was a recent recruit to security forces, official says

BEIRUT (AP) — A man who carried out a killing attack in Syria three US citizens He joined the Syrian internal security forces two months ago as a base security officer and was recently reassigned amid suspicions that he may have ties to the Islamic State group, a Syrian official told The Associated Press on Sunday.

attack on Saturday Two US soldiers and an American civilian were killed and three others were injured in the attack that took place near the historical city of Palmyra in the Syrian desert. Interior ministry spokesman Nur al-Din al-Baba said that three members of the Syrian security forces who clashed with the armed attacker were also injured.

Al Baba said: Syria’s new authorities It faced a shortage of security personnel and had to recruit quickly after the unexpected success of a rebel offensive last year that aimed to capture the northern city of Aleppo but ended in the overthrow of former President Bashar al-Assad’s government.

“We were shocked that we captured all of Syria in 11 days, and this placed a great responsibility on us in terms of security and governance,” he said.

The attacker was one of 5,000 members who recently joined a new unit of internal security forces formed in the desert region known as Badiya, one of the places where remnants of the Islamic State extremist group remain active.

The attacker aroused suspicion

Al-Baba said leaders of the internal security forces had recently become suspicious of a spy leaking information to ISIS and began evaluating all members in the Badiya area.

Al-Baba said the investigation raised suspicions about the man who carried out the attack later last week, but authorities decided to monitor him for a few more days to determine whether he was an active ISIS member and, if so, to identify the network he was communicating with. He did not name the attacker.

It also said that as a “precautionary measure” the man was reassigned to guard equipment on the base, where he would be further away from leadership and patrols by U.S.-led coalition forces.

Al-Baba said the man broke into a meeting between US and Syrian security officials who were having lunch together on Saturday and opened fire after clashing with Syrian guards. The attacker was shot and killed at the scene.

Al Baba acknowledged the incident was a “major security breach” but said security forces had “achieved far more successes than failures” in the year since Assad’s ouster.

He said that following the clash, the Syrian army and internal security forces “launched a large-scale sweep in the Badiya region” and destroyed many ISIS cells.

A delicate partnership

The event takes place at a sensitive time US military expands cooperation With Syrian security forces.

The United States has had forces on the ground in Syria for more than a decade with the mission to fight ISIS and has about 900 troops there today.

Before Assad’s ouster, Washington had no diplomatic relations with Damascus and the US military was not working directly with the Syrian army. Its main partner at the time was the Syrian Democratic Forces, led by the Kurds in the northeast of the country.

This situation changed last year. Relations have warmed between the administrations of US President Donald Trump and Syrian interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa, the former leader of the Islamist rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which is listed as a terrorist organization by Washington.

In November, al-Sharaa became the first Syrian president to visit Washington since the country’s independence in 1946. During his visit, Syria announced it had joined the global coalition against the Islamic State, joining 89 other countries committed to combating the group.

U.S. officials have vowed to retaliate against ISIS for the attack but have not publicly commented that the attacker was a member of Syrian security forces.

Critics of the new Syrian authorities cited Saturday’s attack as evidence that security forces are deeply infiltrated by ISIS and are an unreliable partner.

Mouaz Moustafa, director general of the Syria Emergency Task Force, an advocacy group that aims to forge closer ties between Washington and Damascus, said that was unfair.

Although both have Islamist roots, HTS and ISIS are enemies and have clashed frequently over the past decade.

Mustafa, a former member of HTS and allied groups, said: “It is a fact that even those with the most fundamentalist beliefs, the most conservative among the fighters, have a fierce hatred towards ISIS.” he said.

“The coalition between the United States and Syria is the most important partnership in the global fight against ISIS because only Syria has the expertise and experience to deal with it,” he said.