BEIRUT (AP) — A man who carried out an attack in Syria that killed three American citizens had joined Syria’s internal security forces as a base security guard two months earlier and was recently reassigned amid suspicions he may be affiliated with the Islamic State group, a Syrian official told The Associated Press Sunday.
Saturday’s attack in the Syrian desert near the historic city of Palmyra killed two US service members and an American civilian and wounded three others. This also wounded three members of the Syrian security forces who confronted the gunman, said Interior Ministry spokesman Nour al-Din al-Baba.
Al-Baba said Syria’s new authorities faced shortages of security personnel and had to recruit quickly after the unexpected success of a rebel offensive last year that intended to capture the northern city of Aleppo but ended up toppling the government of former President Bashar Assad.
“We were shocked that in 11 days we took all of Syria and this put 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 the desert region known as Badiya, one of the places where remnants of the Islamic State extremist group remained active.
The attacker had raised suspicions
Al-Baba said that the leadership of the internal security forces recently became suspicious that there was an infiltrator who broadcast information to the IS and began to evaluate all members in the Badiya area.
The probe raised suspicions last week about the man who later carried out the attack, but officials decided to continue monitoring him for a few days to try to determine if he was an active member of IS and to identify the network he was communicating with if so, al-Baba said. He did not name the attacker.
At the same time, as a “precautionary measure,” he said, the man was reassigned to guard equipment at the base in a place where he would be further from the leadership and from any patrols by the coalition forces led by the United States.
On Saturday, the man crashed into a meeting between US and Syrian security officials who were dining together and opened fire after clashing with Syrian guards, al-Baba said. The attacker was killed on the spot.
Al-Baba acknowledged the incident was a “major security breach” but said that in the year since Assad’s fall “there have been far more successes than failures” by security forces.
After the shooting, he said, the Syrian army and internal security forces “launched wide sweeps of the Badiya region” and broke a number of alleged IS cells.
A tricky partnership
The incident comes at a delicate time as the US military is expanding its cooperation with the Syrian security forces.
The United States has had forces on the ground in Syria for more than a decade, with a stated mission of fighting IS, with around 900 troops present there today.
Before Assad’s ouster, Washington had no diplomatic relations with Damascus and the US military did not work directly with the Syrian army. His main partner at the time was the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces in the northeast of the country.
This has changed over the past year. Ties heat up between the administrations of US President Donald Trump and interim Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa, the former leader of the Islamic rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham which was previously listed by Washington as a terrorist organization.
In November, al-Sharaa 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 that have pledged to fight the group.
American officials have promised retaliation against IS for this 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 pointed to Saturday’s attack as evidence that the security forces are deeply infiltrated by IS and are an unreliable partner.
Mouaz Moustafa, executive director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, an advocacy group that seeks to build closer relations between Washington and Damascus, said this is unfair.
Despite both having Islamic roots, HTS and IS have been enemies and have often clashed over the past decade.
Among former members of HTS and allied groups, Moustafa, said, “It is a fact that even those who carry the most fundamentalist beliefs, the most conservative within the fighters, have a strong hatred towards ISIS.”
“The coalition 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 deal with this,” he said.