US to look into miscommunication with Russia over incident in which coalition planes bombed Syrian positions
Washington and Moscow are trying to make sense of the circumstances of the military operation in which dozens of Syrian servicemen were killed. A few days have passed since the U.S. Air Force’s botched air strike and there is still no clear understanding of who those targets were and why Russia didn’t warn the United States about the presence of Syrian soldiers in the strike area, information that only came to light after the operation was concluded.
U.S. representatives stated that they informed their Russian colleagues of their intentions to carry out air strikes in Deir ez-Zor. According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, these airstrikes resulted in the death of 62 Syrian servicemen.
The Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation stated that a Russian officer called the Coalition Air Operations Center after the beginning of the attack but the U.S. representative, appointed for receiving calls from Russia, wasn’t there and someone else picked up the phone. Colonel John Thomas, the representative of the U.S. Central Command that is in charge of U.S. military operations in the Middle East, stated that the telephone conversation was mysterious at best.
“We haven’t fully understood what they said,” Thomas said. Later, he said in his interview with Voice of America that it took a long time for the Coalition to establish contact with Russian counterparts before the corresponding U.S. representative and his or her Russian source were able to talk during the second call. “I don’t know exactly what the delay was but this didn’t happen immediately,” Thomas said during his interview.
Information from the second phone call suggests that Russia believed that Coalition aircraft were carrying out air strikes on Syrian Armed Forces and that the airstrikes were cancelled in less than 5 minutes. Thomas told journalists that Coalition air strikes lasted less than an hour. The United States and Australia, whose aircraft took part in the operation, expressed deep regret over the unintentional death of Syrian servicemen.