U.S.-led strike error kills 18 Syrian allies
Kurdish fighters die in friendly fire amid ISIS fight
IRBIL, Iraq — The U.S. military said a misdirected airstrike this week killed 18 friendly fighters allied with the international coalition battling the Islamic State group in northern Syria.
U.S. Central Command said Thursday that coalition aircraft were given the wrong coordinates by the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces for a strike intended to target militants south of their stronghold in Tabqa.
“The coalition’s deepest condolences go out to the members of the SDF and their families. The coalition is in close contact with our SDF partners who have expressed a strong desire to remain focused on the fight against ISIS despite this tragic incident,” Central Command said in a statement.
The Kurdish fighters, with air and ground support from the U.S.-led coalition, had surrounded Tabqa, which is on a dammed section of the Euphrates River just west of Raqqa, the Islamic State group’s de facto capital in Syria. But the strike Tuesday hit their position, killing 18 of them. Several nations have contributed air power to the coalition, and it was not immediately clear which was behind the strike.
It also was not clear how many such friendly-fire strikes have happened since the campaign began against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria in 2014.
The coalition releases monthly reports of civilian casualties from airstrikes, both those confirmed and under investigation. But friendly-fire strikes are tracked internally, said U.S. Army Col. Joe Scrocca, a Baghdad-based spokesman for the coalition.
“The coalition takes each of these incidents very seriously but we do not keep cumulative data on them like we do civilian casualties because they happen so infrequently,” he said.
The London-based monitoring group Airwars, which works with the coalition to track airstrike casualties, has found 37 reported friendly-fire strikes in Iraq and Syria since 2014.
Four had been confirmed by the coalition, including the one in Tabqa, according to Airwars director Chris Woods. The others are:
A strike on Dec. 18, 2015, in Fallujah that killed at least nine Iraqi soldiers and injured 32 more.
A strike on Sept. 17, 2016, in Al Tharda, Syria, that killed at least 15 friendly Syrian forces.
A strike on Oct. 5, 2016, south of Mosul that killed 18 friendly Sunni tribal fighters.
“It’s very difficult to know how many more friendly-fire events there have been since the coalition does not disclose this information,” Woods said.
Meanwhile, President Bashar Assad said a chemical weapons attack on a rebel-held town in northern Idlib province last week that was widely blamed on his forces was a “fabrication.”
“Our impression is that the West, mainly the United States, is hand-in-glove with the terrorists,” Assad told Agence France-Presse in his first comments since a U.S. missile strike on a Syrian air base in retaliation for the chemical attack.
“They fabricated the whole story in order to have a pretext” to attack the air base, Assad said in the interview, a video of which was released by his office.
In Washington, State Department spokesman Mark Toner called Assad’s comments “an attempt by him to throw up false flags, create confusion.”
“There can be little doubt that the recent attacks and the chemical weapons attack in Idlib was by the Syrian government, by the Syrian regime and that it wasn’t only a violation of the laws of war but it was, we believe, a war crime,” Toner said.
Syria strongly denies it was behind the April 4 chemical attack on the town of Khan Sheikhoun, which killed 87 people, including more than a dozen children. The government says Syrian warplanes struck an alQaida arms depot that contained chemical weapons.
The international chemical weapons watchdog is testing samples from the suspected nerve gas attack and could produce a report on the matter within three weeks, the British delegation to the commission said Thursday.
The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has a standing fact-finding mission on Syria to investigate alleged chemical weapons attacks, but does not apportion blame. During a meeting of its executive council called to discuss the Khan Sheikhoun attack, the U.S. ambassador, Kenneth D. Ward, said Syrian authorities “abetted by Russia’s continuing efforts to bury the truth” still possess and use banned chemical weapons.
On Wednesday, Russia vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution demanding a speedy probe into the Khan Sheikhoun attack. U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley said the veto left Moscow, a key ally of the Syrian government, with “a lot to prove.”