An airstrike has killed nearly 40 pro-regime foreign fighters in eastern Syria, with a US-led coalition denying accusations from Damascus that it was behind the attack.
The airstrike just before midnight hit Al-Hari, a town controlled by regional militias fighting in the seven-year war on the side of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitor of the conflict, said it was one of the deadliest air raids on government loyalists in the past few months.
“Thirty-eight non-Syrian fighters from regime loyalist militias were killed in the night-time raid on Al-Hari, on the Syrian-Iraqi border,” observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman said.
He could not give any further details on their nationalities, but there are Iraqi, Iranian, Lebanese and Afghan fighters stationed in the area.
Syrian state media reported the attack overnight, citing a military source and accusing the US-led coalition fighting the Islamic State (IS) group of carrying it out.
It said several people were killed and wounded, but did not give a specific number or their nationalities.
The coalition’s press office said it had heard reports that an airstrike in the area had killed and wounded members of a pro-regime Iraqi militia, but denied it was responsible.
“There have been no strikes by US or coalition forces in that area,” it told reporters by e-mail.
Last month, a dozen pro-regime fighters were killed in an airstrike on Syrian government positions that the observatory and state media blamed on the coalition.
The US Department of Defense denied responsibility.
In February, US-led coalition airstrikes killed at least 100 pro-regime fighters in Deir Ezzor Province, including Russians.
“The strike on Al-Hari produced the highest death toll for regime forces since the February incident,” Rahman said.
More than 350,000 people have been killed since Syria’s conflict erupted in 2011 with protests against al-Assad’s rule.
The strike on Al-Hari came a day after the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces announced it had ousted Islamic State militants from Dashisha, a village to the north in Syria’s Hasakeh Province.
The village had been one of the last IS-controlled areas on a corridor linking Syria with Iraq.
“For the first time in four years, Dashisha, a notorious transit town for weapons, fighters and suicide bombers between Iraq and Syria, is no longer controlled by ISIS terrorists,” Brett McGurk, the US president’s special envoy for the war against the IS, said yesterday, using another acronym for the group.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.