A COALITION raid deliberately targeted a Syrian Army camp killing at least three soldiers and injuring 13 others, it has been claimed.
The Syrian Government is now demanding “immediate action” from the UN over the incident, while the US denies bombing the camp in Deir al-Zour province.
If true, the raid would be the first known attack on the army of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad since the US-led coalition air strikes against Daesh extremists began last year.
Syria’s foreign ministry said yesterday that coalition warplanes fired nine missiles at the camp, denouncing the attack as “flagrant aggression”.
Along with the human casualties, a weapons cache, ammunition, four military cars and three armoured vehicles were obliterated in the raid by four coalition warplanes, said Syrian officials. A complaint has been made by the Syrian government to the UN urging it to take “immediate action and take the necessary measures to prevent a repeat” of the attack.
“The Syrian Arab Republic strongly condemns this flagrant aggression by the US-led coalition forces, which blatantly violates the objectives of the UN charter,” said a ministry statement.
Deir al-Zour has been a constant target of the coalition as the eastern province is largely controlled by Daesh which uses the oilfields there as a major revenue source.
However the US Government’s envoy Brett McGurk denied the coalition had attacked the camp, saying there had been no air strikes on Sunday within 35 miles of the soldiers. US Colonel Steve Warren said: “We’ve seen those Syrian reports but we did not conduct any strikes in that part of Deir al-Zour yesterday. So we see no evidence.”
A US military spokesman said: “We did not strike any vehicles or personnel targets in this area. We have no indication any Syrian soldiers were even near our strikes.”
The spokesman added: “We take all allegations of potential collateral damage seriously and will look into every allegation we receive.” However the UK-based monitoring group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said four soldiers from the Syrian Government forces had been killed in a raid on the Saeqa camp, near the town of Ayyash in northern Deir al-Zour, just outside the area controlled by Daesh.
The group said that another coalition air strike had killed two children and their mother in Deir al-Zour city on Sunday night.
Also on Sunday, at least 32 Daesh fighters were killed in apparent US-led coalition strikes on the Islamist militants’ stronghold of Raqqa province in the north of Syria.
The attacks came as Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad denounced the Westminster Government’s decision to join the air strikes.
Calling the strikes “illegal”, Assad said they would cause “terrorism” to spread.
“It will be harmful and illegal and it will support terrorism as happened after the coalition started its operation a year or so [ago],” he said,
He added that “terror” was “like a cancer which had to be wiped out with an intelligent plan that would involve working with troops on the ground”.
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