ISTANBUL — Two U.S. soldiers and an American civilian interpreter were killed Saturday after a gunman attacked a joint U.S.-Syrian security patrol in the central Syrian city of Palmyra, the Pentagon and Syria’s state news agency said.
Three other U.S. soldiers and two members of Syria’s security forces, were also injured, U.S. officials and the state news agency said. The gunman, who was identified by U.S. Central Command as a member of the Islamic State militant group, was killed by “partner forces,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote in a post on X, but did not provide further details.
The attack occurred at a moment when the United States and Syria’s new government have touted warmer ties and closer anti-terrorism cooperation, more than a year after rebels led by Syrian interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa toppled Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s longtime dictator.
Saturday’s assault occurred as the U.S. soldiers were “conducting a key leader engagement,” while engaged in a counterterrorism operation, Sean Parnell, the chief Pentagon spokesman, wrote in a message on X. The identity of the soldiers who were killed was being withheld, pending notification of their families, he said.
After the attack, victims were evacuated from the area by helicopter to a U.S. military base at Al-Tanf, about 75 miles south of Palmyra, the Syrian new agency reported. Palmyra, a UNESCO heritage site famed for its Roman ruins, was occupied for several years during Syria’s civil war by the Islamic State, or ISIS, and sits in a region of Syria where attacks by the militant group have persisted.
The U.S. has kept a military presence in Syria since 2015, when U.S. troops partnered with Kurdish-led Syrian forces to fight ISIS after it seized large swaths of territory in Syria and neighboring Iraq. U.S. troops remained in Syria after the defeat of ISIS in 2019, in a mission that the U.S. military says is aimed at fighting the militant group’s still-dangerous remnants.
Saturday’s attack came just weeks after the United States, during a visit by Sharaa to the White House, announced that the new Syrian government was formally joining the global anti-Isis coalition. “We have now had multiple collaborations with the Syrian government to counter very specific ISIS threats,” Adm. Brad Cooper, the head of U.S. Central Command, said in remarks to a conference on Syria at the Middle East Institute in Washington last week.
Lamothe reported from Washington.
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