- As 3 Special Forces Troops Killed and 2 Are Wounded in an Ambush in Niger
A Russian airstrike has killed 38 civilians as they tried to cross the Euphrates river to escape fighting in eastern Syria’s Deir ez-Zor province, a monitor has said.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, based in Britain, said nine children were among those killed as they tried to cross the river aboard rafts, escaping from areas where Russian-backed regime forces are battling the Islamic State group.
The monitor, which earlier gave a toll of 20 in the strikes, said the dead included an Iraqi family.
Deir ez-Zor borders Iraq and civilians have fled into the province to escape the battles against Isis in their own country.
Two campaigns are being fought against Isis in east Deir ez-Zor, with the one on the western side of the Euphrates river, which slices diagonally across the province, led by Syrian troops and backed by their ally Russia.
The second is being fought by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), an alliance of Kurdish and Arab fighters, on the eastern bank of the river.
The Observatory relies on a network of sources inside Syria, and says it determines whose planes carry out raids according to type, location, flight patterns and munitions used.
The group has reported hundreds of civilians killed in operations against Isis in Deir ez-Zor and neighbouring Raqqa province, where the SDF is fighting with US support to capture the former jihadist bastion of Raqqa city.
On Tuesday, the Observatory said a US-led coalition strike in Raqqa had killed at least 18 civilians.
The coalition says it takes all measures possible to avoid civilian casualties and that it investigates each credible allegation.
In the meantime, three United States Army Special Forces were killed and two were wounded on Wednesday in an ambush in Niger while on a training mission with troops from that nation in northwestern Africa, American military officials said.
“We can confirm reports that a joint U.S. and Nigerien patrol came under hostile fire in southwest Niger,” Lt. Cmdr. Anthony Falvo, a spokesman for the United States Africa Command in Stuttgart, Germany, said in an email.
All five American soldiers were Green Berets, said two United States military officials. The attack took place 120 miles north of Niamey, the capital of Niger, near the border with Mali, where militants with Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, an affiliate of Al Qaeda, have conducted cross-border raids. Niger’s troops were also believed to have suffered casualties, but details were not immediately known.
The deaths mark the first American casualties under hostile fire in a mission in which United States Special Forces have provided training and security assistance to the Nigerien armed forces, including support for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. A Special Forces soldier died in a vehicle accident in Niger in February.
One of the military officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss continuing military operations, said American forces were rushing to the scene of the ambush, presumably to evacuate American and Nigerien casualties, and possibly to hunt down the attackers.
President Trump was briefed on the deaths of the Green Berets, said the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Details of the late-afternoon ambush were sketchy. Soldiers from the 3rd Special Forces Group were assisting their Nigerien counterparts with counterterrorism training when they came under attack in a remote part of the country. As of late Wednesday, there had been no claims of responsibility.
In his first eight months in office, Mr. Trump’s top military officials have shown few signs that they want to back away from President Barack Obama’s strategy to train, equip and otherwise support indigenous armies and security forces to fight their own wars instead of deploying large American forces to far-flung hot spots, including the Sahel, a vast area on the southern flank of the Sahara that stretches from Senegal to Sudan.
And that is what is happening in Niger, a desperately poor, landlocked country twice the size of California that is struggling, even with assistance from the United States and France, to stem a flow of insurgents across Niger’s lightly guarded borders with Mali, Nigeria and Libya.
But unlike recent commando raids in Somalia or Reaper drone strikes in Libya, the deadly ambush on Wednesday in a remote desert area came during what American military officials said was a routine training mission — not a combat operation — and yet the casualties suffered by both American and Nigerien forces underscore the inherent risks of operating in a potentially hostile environment.
“These militants have proven remarkably resilient, exploiting local and/or ethnic grievances to embed themselves into communities as well as political borders and differences to escape capture,” said J. Peter Pham, a vice president at the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center in Washington. “It was no accident that this attack took place near Niger’s border with Mali, an area that has seen numerous incidents in recent years.”
Guardian with additional report from MSN
