Russia threatens U.S. jets in Syria
WASHINGTON — Long-running tensions between the United States and Russia erupted publicly on Monday as Moscow condemned the U.S. military’s downing of a Syrian warplane and threatened to target aircraft flown by the United States and its allies west of the Euphrates.
The Russians also said they had suspended their use of a hotline that the U.S. and Russian militaries used to avoid collisions of their aircraft in Syrian airspace.
The episode was the first time the United States has downed a Syrian plane since the civil war began there in 2011 and came after the SU-22 jet dropped bombs on Sunday near U.S.-backed fighters combating the Islamic State.
It followed another major U.S. military action against the Syrian government: a cruise missile strike to punish a nerve gas attack that killed civilians in April.
The latest escalation comes as competing forces converge on ungoverned swaths of Syria amid the country’s six-year civil war.
Syrian forces and Iranianbacked militias that support them are extending their reach east closer to U.S.-backed fighters, including forces that the Pentagon hopes will pursue the militants into the Euphrates River valley after they take the Islamic State’s self-declared capital of Raqqa. The collision of the disparate forces has, in effect, created a war within a war.
“The escalation of hostilities among the many factions that are operating in this region doesn’t help anybody,” Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Monday.
President Donald Trump has allowed military commanders more say in conducting operations against the Islamic State, urging them to surround the militants in their strongholds and “annihilate” them.
Russia’s warnings could turn out to be posturing. The Russian military has threatened to halt its use of the hotline in the past — notably after Trump ordered April’s missile launch — only to continue and even expand its contacts with the U.S. military. But in the complicated and quickly unfolding situation in Syria, even bluster can risk an unintended showdown.
“Anytime we have multiple armed forces working in the same battle space without deconfliction, there is a dangerous risk of things spinning out of control,” said Douglas Lute, a retired three-star Army general who was the U.S. representative to NATO until January. “Tactical incidents on the ground or in the air over Syria can be misunderstood and lead to miscalculation.”
U.S. military officials rushed to de-escalate the situation, saying they hoped Russia could be persuaded to keep using the hotline. “This is a delicate couple of hours,” Gen. Joseph Dunford Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Monday afternoon. He added that the United States would work both diplomatically and militarily “to re-establish de-confliction.”
But the latest statement from Russia’s Defense Ministry was particularly stark. “All flying objects, including planes and drones of the international coalition, detected west of the Euphrates, will be followed by Russian air defense systems as targets,” said the defense ministry statement, which stopped short of declaring that the targets would be shot down.
The Pentagon also vowed to continue airstrikes against the Islamic State in Syria.
The downing of the warplane — the first time in the six-year conflict that the U.S. has shot down a Syrian jet — came amid another first: Iran fired several ballistic missiles Sunday night at ISIS positions in Syria in what it said was a message to archrival Saudi Arabia and the U.S.
Iran said the missile strike by its powerful Revolutionary Guard hit Syria’s eastern city of Deir el-Zour on Sunday night and was in retaliation for two attacks in Tehran earlier this month that killed 17 people and were claimed by the Islamic State group.
It appeared to be Iran’s first missile attack abroad in over 15 years and its first in the Syrian conflict, in which it has provided crucial support to Assad.
The downing of the Syrian SU-22 on Sunday was the latest in a series of confrontations between the United States and forces loyal to President Bashar Assad of Syria.
One previously undisclosed confrontation followed a drone attack on June 8 on U.S.-supported Syrians fighting alongside their coalition advisers. The weapon was a Shahed 129 drone made by Iran, though U.S. officials said they do not know who directed it.
An American F-15E shot down the drone, which had dropped a bomb that missed its target. But a Syrian warplane appeared hours later and began maneuvering to bomb the U.S.backed fighters, only to be intercepted by an American F/A-18 jet.
“When the airplane got close to where he wanted to deliver his bombs, he realized he had an F/A-18 behind it,” said Lt. Gen. Jeffrey L. Harrigian, who runs the coalition’s air war and described the episode.
Instead of attacking, the Syrian SU-22 zoomed away, and the Americans did not attack.
“We didn’t shoot it because he dumped his bombs off in the middle of the desert,” Harrigian added in a telephone interview from his command center at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar.