Russia and Syria Denounce U.S. Airstrike on Pro-Assad Militia

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/19/world/middleeast/syria-russia-us-convoy.html

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BEIRUT, Lebanon — Russian and Syrian officials on Friday strongly condemned an American airstrike on pro-Syrian government forces in southern Syria a day earlier, calling it an act of aggression and rejecting the United States’ justification for the attack.

“It is illegitimate, it is unlawful and the latest gross violation of the sovereignty of the Syrian Arab Republic,” Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, said in Cyprus, according to the state-run Russian news agency Tass.

After the airstrike, which American officials said was defensive in nature, Pentagon officials said on Friday that they were working with Russia to prevent similar ground incidents in the future, much as the two countries have done for months to avoid accidents in the skies over Syria.

“We had a proposal that we’re working on with the Russians right now,” Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters on Friday, declining to give details. “My sense is that the Russians are as enthusiastic as we are to deconflict operations and ensure that we can continue to take the campaign to ISIS and ensure the safety of our personnel.”

General Dunford said that “the ground is becoming increasingly complex and constrained” in Syria, as Russian-backed pro-government forces advance closer to Raqqa, the de facto capital of ISIS-held territory in Syria, and are already fighting in cities to the south like Deir Azzour.

The general said that, in addition to a communications channel between Russian officers in Syria and American officers in Qatar that is used to prevent midair collisions, another channel has been opened in which a three-star general in Washington now speaks regularly with his counterpart in Moscow.

United States military officials said on Thursday that in the airstrike, American warplanes hit a convoy of pro-government militia forces because it was approaching a base where American and British special operations troops train Syrian rebels to fight the Islamic State. The officials said the convoy ignored a warning strike.

For its part, the Syrian government said the United States had no right to defend the base, which was established in Syria without government permission, or to declare areas off limits to pro-government forces.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said on Friday that the convoy included some Iranian-backed militia forces. But Pentagon officials said it was too soon to say whether Iran had directed the convoy to attack the rebel training base, which is near the border with Jordan.

The airstrike came against the backdrop of a broader geopolitical contest to take control of areas of eastern Syria held by the Islamic State, as well as of the highway from Damascus to Baghdad, which passes through the area where the strike took place.

Two competing coalitions — backed by air power from the United States in one case and from Russia in the other — are racing to the same goal, creating a potentially volatile situation and increasing the likelihood of clashes like the one on Thursday.

SANA, the Syrian state news agency, said the strike unmasked “fake claims” by the Americans that they were fighting terrorism, adding that anyone claiming to be fighting the Islamic State and Al Qaeda should “direct strikes against them” and not against Syrian and allied forces.

Video posted online showed what was described as the aftermath of the attack. Voices speaking with an Iraqi accent in Arabic bolstered accounts that Iraqi militias — many of which have fought on the Syrian government side with Iranian support — had been hit.

A day before the attack, Iraq’s national security adviser, Faleh al-Fayed, who acts as a go-between for Iran and the United States on the battle against the Islamic State in Iraq, had visited President Bashar al-Assad of Syria in Damascus to reaffirm Iraqi and Syrian government cooperation against the extremist group.

The militia Sayyid al-Shuhada, or Master of Martyrs, said in a statement that the United States had forgotten the role played by the resistance in Iraq during the war there and accused American forces of interfering in their fight against Islamic State.

“Targeting our presence in Syria is targeting us in Iraq, too, and we will strike the enemy and its supporters everywhere,” the statement said.

The recriminations came as the latest round of talks in Geneva on the Syria crisis wrapped up with the parties having barely touched on the four “baskets” of issues that were scheduled to be discussed.

Staffan de Mistura, the United Nations mediator, told reporters that he saw “less rhetoric, a more businesslike atmosphere” in the talks, but little, if any, progress. He said he hoped to bring the Syrian parties back to Geneva for another round sometime in June.

Russia’s Middle East envoy, Mikhail Bogdanov, complained on Friday about the approach taken by the United States, calling it contradictory.

“The impression that the new administration gives is that it does not have any tactics, nor more importantly does it have any strategy,” he told reporters in Russia. “It apparently searches for any way of solving problems, as it thinks, and maybe it is not very interested in some problems at all.”

Although the United States has covertly aided some Syrian rebels fighting Mr. Assad, it has directly struck pro-government forces only twice before — in 2016 in what it called an accident, and this year in retaliation for chemical attacks it blamed on Mr. Assad’s forces.

The area where the convoy was struck is strategically important to the United States, which wants to stabilize Iraq — where it has a long-term military and political investment — and to Russia, which wants to strengthen the Syrian government’s control of as much territory as possible.

The area is also critical to Iran, which wants secure corridors from its borders to the Mediterranean in order to reinforce its influence in Lebanon and to maintain an ability to challenge Israel.