Attacker who killed US troops in Syria was a recent recruit to security forces

The attack, which occurred on Saturday in the Syrian desert near the historic city of Palmyra, led to the death of two American soldiers and an American civilian, and the wounding of three others. Nour al-Din al-Baba, spokesman for the Ministry of Interior, said that the explosion also wounded three members of the Syrian security forces who clashed with the gunman.

The new Syrian authorities faced a shortage of security personnel and had to recruit them quickly after the unexpected success of a rebel offensive last year that aimed to seize the northern city of Aleppo but ended up overthrowing the government of former president Bashar al-Assad, the pope said.

He said: “We were shocked because we took control of all of Syria within 11 days, and this places before us a great responsibility on the security and administrative sides.”

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 Badia, one of the places where remnants of the extremist Islamic State group remained active.

The attacker has raised suspicions

The Pope said that the leadership of the Internal Security Forces recently suspected the presence of an infiltrator leaking information to ISIS and began evaluating all elements in the Badia region.

The Pope added that the investigation 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 whether he was an active member of ISIS and determine the network he was communicating with, if so. The attacker’s name was not mentioned.

Meanwhile, as a precaution, the man was reassigned to guard equipment at the base in a location where he would be away from command and any US-led coalition patrols.

The Pope said that on Saturday, the man stormed a meeting between American and Syrian security officials who were having lunch together and opened fire after clashing with Syrian guards. The attacker was shot and killed at the scene.

The Pope acknowledged that the incident was a “major security breach” but said that in the year following Assad’s fall “there were far more successes than failures” by the security forces.

He added that following the shooting, the Syrian army and the Internal Security Forces “launched large-scale combing operations in the Badia region” and dismantled a number of alleged ISIS cells. The Ministry of Interior said in a later statement that five suspects were arrested in the city of Palmyra.

A sensitive partnership

The incident comes at a sensitive time as the US military expands its cooperation with the Syrian security forces.

The United States has had troops on the ground in Syria for more than a decade, with a stated mission of fighting ISIS, with about 900 troops there today.

Before Assad’s overthrow, Washington had no diplomatic relations with 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 over the past year. Relations have improved between the administrations of US President Donald Trump and interim Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, the former leader of the Islamic rebel group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, which Washington had included on the list of terrorist organizations.

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 joining the global coalition against ISIS, joining 89 other countries committed to fighting the organization.

US officials have vowed to retaliate against ISIS for the attack, but have not commented publicly 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 security forces are deeply infiltrated by ISIS and are an unreliable partner.

This is unfair, said Moaz Mustafa, executive director of the Syrian Emergency Team, an advocacy group seeking to build closer relations between Washington and Damascus.

Although both have Islamist roots, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham and ISIS have been enemies and have often clashed over the past decade.

“It is a fact that even those with the most fundamentalist beliefs, the most conservative among the fighters, have an intense hatred for ISIS,” said Mustafa, among the former members of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and its allied groups.

He said: “The alliance between the United States and Syria is the most important partnership in the global war against ISIS because only Syria has the expertise and experience to deal with this matter.”

Later on Sunday, the Syrian news agency SANA reported that four members of the Internal Security Forces were killed and a fifth was wounded after gunmen opened fire on them in the city of Maarat al-Numan in Idlib governorate.

It was not immediately clear who the gunmen were or whether the attack was related to the shooting that occurred on Saturday.