A collision between Syrian troops and American troops reportedly left at least one Syrian dead – a rare confrontation on a battlefield, confused by an abundance of foreign intervening forces during the prolonged civil war. Some local media outlets said a U.S. military official was injured in the incident at a Syrian air base, but there was no immediate confirmation from the U.S. military.
An independent organization for war monitoring and Syrian state media spoke only about Syrian victims.
The incident happened on Monday south of Qamishli, a town in northern Syria near the Turkish border, when Syrian troops refused to cross a checkpoint near a Qamishli air base for a U.S. patrol, according to the Syrian regime and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights ( SOHR) war monitoring group.
Videos posted on social media appeared to confirm reports of an exchange of gunfire between the Syrian troops at the checkpoint and U.S. troops.
Both SOHR and Syrian state media said U.S. troops were calling in helicopter gunships that hit the checkpoint, killing victims among regime soldiers.
State News Agency SANA said one soldier was killed and two wounded after “an American patrol attempted to enter the area from the deployment of one of our combat formations in the rural town of Qamishli.”
It said troops turned US troops over, but “half an hour later, two U.S. helicopters attacked the checkpoint with heavy machine guns, killing one soldier and wounding two others.”
SOHR said two Syrian troops had been killed. Neither the Syrian regime nor the monitoring group, which is based in the United Kingdom but based on an extensive network of resources on the ground in the war-torn country, mentioned all the victims among the American troops.
SOHR said the strike was the first deadly clash involving all foreign troops in Syria for months in Syria, but tensions in the northern part of the country have been high.
Along with the Russian-backed Syrian state forces and Russian troops, Kurdish fighters, Turkish-backed militias, and the U.S. military are all working in the area.
Confrontations such as those leading to the apparent airstrike on Monday have regularly taken place in the region for months, with U.S. patrols coming into contact with Syrian troops and their Russian benefactors, but they have been largely resolved without deadly force. .
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