Syrian government warplanes were spotted over the flashpoint Syrian city of Hasakah again on Saturday, despite warnings from the US-led coalition that strikes could hit its military advisers working with the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
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Marine Major Adrian Rankine-Galloway, a spokesperson at the US Secretary of Defense, confirmed to MEE on Friday that Syrian government jets carried out air strikes against US-backed ground forces last Thursday.
He added that Turkey would now take a more active role in addressing the conflict in Syria in the next six months to prevent the war-torn country being divided along ethnic lines. The group has ties to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in Turkey.
A Pentagon official said US-led coalition aircraft were sent near Hasaka on Thursday to protect coalition special operation ground forces in response to bombing by Syrian jets and additional combat air patrols were being sent to the area. Davis also confirmed that this is the closest USA forces on the ground have come to an attack from the Syrian regime.
Regime warplanes were in the air above Hasakeh throughout the night and into Saturday morning, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring group.
“If the regime continues bombing in close proximity to USA forces, then simply I think the United States will shoot down the regime aircraft”, he added.
Defense officials later said the Syrian aircraft were Su-24s. A journalist in Hasakeh said on Saturday afternoon that the clashes had abated.
They came after heavy clashes broke out on Wednesday between Kurdish fighters who control two-thirds of the city and pro-government militia who control the rest.
Washington regards the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) as the most effective fighting force against IS in Syria and has provided them with air support as well as the military advisers. That led to American warplanes being scrambled to protect them, though the Syrian aircraft had left the area by the time the USA planes arrived.
So now U.S. fighter jets, operating entirely illegally in Syrian airspace, decimating the Syrian people, towns, cities, villages, archeological sites, hospitals, schools, factories and infrastructure accuse the Syrian Air Force of being “foreign military aircraft”.
Davis said no coalition injuries were reported in Thursday’s strike by two Syrian SU-24s, and U.S. special operations advisers have been moved to a safe location.
In Syria’s devastated city of Aleppo, more than 300 civilians have been killed in a three-week surge of fighting, the Observatory said yesterday.
A regime source in the city told Agence France Presse that the air strikes were “a message to the Kurds that they should stop this sort of demand that constitutes an affront to national sovereignty”.
Although no weapons were fired, the incident is remarkable in that the USA forces felt the Syrian jets to be enough of a threat to United States personnel on the ground for the coalition’s military apparatus to swing into action. The US relayed the warning to Syria through Russian Federation because they are allied with the Syrian government in that country’s civil war.
Meanwhile Moscow has released videos showing Russian warships in the Mediterranean firing missiles it says targeted the Islamist Jabhat group in Syria, formerly known as al-Nusra.
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More than 290,000 people have lost their lives since Syria’s conflict erupted in March 2011, and millions have been forced to flee their homes.
