BEIRUT (AP) — A man who carried out an attack in Syria that killed three American citizens joined Syria’s internal security forces as a base security guard two months ago and was recently reassigned amid suspicions he may be affiliated with the Islamic State group, a Syrian official told The Associated Press on Sunday.
Two American soldiers and one American citizen were killed and three others were injured in an attack in the Syrian desert near the historic city of Palmyra on Saturday. Three members of the Syrian security forces were also wounded in the clash with the gunmen, Interior Ministry spokesman Noor al-Din al-Baba said.
Al-Baba said Syria’s new authorities faced a shortage of security personnel and had to recruit rapidly after the unexpected success of a rebel offensive aimed at capturing the northern city of Aleppo last year but toppled the government of former President Bashar Assad.
“We were surprised that we captured the whole of Syria in 11 days and it posed a huge responsibility in front of us from the security and administration side,” he said.
The attacker was among 5,000 members who recently joined a new division in the Internal Security Forces formed in a desert region called Badia, where remnants of the Islamic State extremist group are active.
The assailant expressed suspicion
Al-Baba said the leadership of the Internal Security Forces had recently become suspicious of an infiltrator leaking information to IS and had begun evaluating all members in the Badia region.
The investigation later raised suspicions about the attacker last week, but authorities decided to continue monitoring him for several days to find out if he was an active member of IS and, if so, to identify the network he was communicating with, al-Baba said. He did not reveal the name of the attacker.
At the same time, as a “precautionary measure,” he said, the man was reassigned to guard equipment at a location where he would be away from leadership and patrols by U.S.-led coalition forces.
On Saturday, the man attacked a meeting between U.S. and Syrian security officials who were eating together and opened fire after clashing with Syrian guards, al-Baba said. The attacker was shot and killed on the spot.
Al-Baba acknowledged the incident was a “major security breach” but said security forces had “more successes than failures” in the year since Assad’s fall.
After the shooting, he said, the Syrian army and internal security forces “launched a sweeping sweep of the Badiya region” and dismantled several alleged IS cells.
A delicate partnership
The incident comes at a critical time when the US military is expanding its cooperation with Syrian security forces.
The U.S. has deployed troops to Syria for more than a decade, with about 900 troops present today, with the stated mission of fighting IS.
Before Assad’s ouster, Washington had no diplomatic ties to Damascus and the US military did not work directly with the Syrian army. Its main partner at the time was the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces in the northeast of the country.
That has changed in the past year. Relations have warmed between the administration of US President Donald Trump and Syria’s interim president Ahmed al-Shara, the former leader of the Islamist rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which Washington has listed as a terrorist organization.
In November, al-Shara became the first Syrian president to visit Washington since the country’s independence in 1946. During his visit, Syria announced its entry into the global coalition against the Islamic State, joining 89 other countries committed to fighting the group.
US officials have vowed retaliation against IS for the attack but have not publicly commented on the fact that the shooter was a member of the Syrian security forces.
Critics of the new Syrian authorities have pointed to Saturday’s attack as evidence that security forces have been deeply infiltrated by IS and are an unreliable partner.
Mous Mustafa, executive director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, an advocacy group that seeks to build closer ties between Washington and Damascus, said that was unfair.
Although both have Islamist roots, HTS and IS are enemies and have often clashed over the past decade.
Among former members of HTS and allied groups, Mustafa said, “It’s a fact that even those who hold the most radical beliefs, even the most conservative within the militants, hate ISIS.”
“The alliance between the United States and Syria is the most important partnership in the global fight against ISIS because only Syria has the expertise and experience to counter it,” he said.
