Tag: syria

On December 13, 2025, a joint patrol of U.S. and Syrian forces near Palmyra, Syria, was ambushed by a suspected Islamic State (ISIS) gunman. The lone attacker opened fire on the convoy before being killed by American and partner forces. Two U.S. Army soldiers from the Iowa National Guard and an American civilian interpreter were killed in the assault, and three other U.S. service members were wounded.

The U.S. military and President Donald Trump blamed the Islamic State for the attack and vowed serious retaliation, a position initially echoed by Syrian authorities, who also announced the arrest of several suspects. However, a Syrian government spokesperson later acknowledged that the attacker was a member of state security forces who had been radicalized by ISIS.

Al-Sharaa, the country’s new leader, was formerly the founder of an extremist group that pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda. He is now seeking to rebrand himself as a legitimate statesman to secure sanctions relief, U.S. trade, and foreign investment. To that end, he has prioritized normalizing relations with the Trump administration through intelligence-sharing on ISIS and Iranian proxies, joint counterterrorism efforts, and broader international legitimacy.

He recently became the first Syrian leader hosted at the White House, and Syria formally joined the international coalition fighting ISIS just one month before the attack. Against that backdrop, the question is why the Syrian government admitted that a member of its security forces carried out the attack on U.S. soldiers.

The first reason is that it would have been difficult to claim otherwise because U.S. forces were present and witnessed exactly what happened. The second reason is that Syrian security personnel were also present and witnessed the entire incident. The attack targeted a joint U.S.-Syrian patrol, with members of the Syrian Internal Security Forces directly involved. Two Syrian service personnel were wounded, underscoring their proximity to the attack. Syrian forces were on site, responded to the gunfire, and killed the attacker.

Multiple Syrian officers were present as part of a “key leader engagement.” The Pentagon and CENTCOM stated that the attack occurred during a meeting between U.S. troops and Syrian Interior Ministry officials who had traveled from Damascus to coordinate with local counterparts in Palmyra.

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On December 13, 2025, two U.S. soldiers and a civilian interpreter were killed near Palmyra, Syria. According to a Pentagon statement, a lone Islamic State (ISIS) gunman disguised as a shepherd opened fire on a joint U.S.–Syrian patrol, killing three and wounding three before Syrian troops shot him dead. Donald Trump responded with characteristic fury; he promised “very serious retaliation” and said Syria’s new president Ahmed al‑Sharaa was “devastated” by the attack. Yet the promise to end America’s “forever wars” has been part of his pitch since 2016, and U.S. troops remain.

The withdrawal that never happened

Trump first told Americans he had “won against ISIS” in December 2018 and ordered U.S. troops home. In reality, Pentagon and congressional pressure kept about half of the roughly 2,000 troops in place. Less than a year later he issued another withdrawal order, but officials left 90 percent of the force to “guard oil fields.” Reports noted that the mission quickly shifted from defeating ISIS to protecting oil; roughly 500 troops stayed behind to keep oil fields from falling into jihadist hands.

Behind the scenes, U.S. officials were playing “shell games.” James Jeffrey, Trump’s envoy for Syria, later admitted they deliberately misled the president about troop numbers. “We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there,” he confessed. Though Trump publicly agreed to keep only 200–400 troops, the actual number was “a lot more than” that. Journalists eventually learned that roughly 900 U.S. troops remained.

The Pentagon continued to slow‑roll civilian orders after Trump returned to office in 2025. In December 2024 the Defense Department quietly acknowledged there were about 2,000 U.S. troops in Syria – roughly 1,100 more than the 900 “core” personnel previously reported. Officials explained that these extra soldiers were “temporary rotational forces” deployed to meet fluid mission requirements. The new U.S. envoy, Thomas Barrack, announced plans to close most of the eight bases and consolidate operations in Hasakah province. Yet by November 2025 Reuters reported that the Pentagon intended to halve the troop presence to 1,000 and establish a new base at Damascus’ airport – a sign that numbers change on paper while the boots stay.

From jihadist to head of state

Understanding why American troops are still in Syria requires grappling with the identity of its new president. Ahmed Hussein al‑Sharaa – better known as Abu Mohammed al‑Julani – joined al‑Qaeda in Iraq and later founded the al‑Nusra Front. After splitting from al‑Qaeda the group rebranded as Hayat Tahrir al‑Sham (HTS), which the United Nations and United States still classify as a terrorist organisation. In late 2024 HTS swept across Syria, toppling Bashar al‑Assad’s government and ending the thirteen‑year civil war. By January 2025 its leader proclaimed himself interim president and adopted the name Ahmed al‑Sharaa. Despite the rebranding, the Congressional Research Service notes that both HTS and Sharaa remain on U.N. sanctions lists.

Trump embraced Sharaa as an ally. In May 2025 he met the Syrian leader in Riyadh and praised him as a “tough” leader. The following November he welcomed Sharaa to the White House – the first visit by a Syrian head of state since 1946 – and told reporters he was doing “a very good job.” Commentators recalled that only a few years earlier Americans would have balked at a president welcoming a former al‑Qaeda commander. The meeting delivered what Sharaa craved: legitimacy.

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The gunman who killed two members of the Iowa National Guard and an American civilian interpreter in an attack in Palmyra, central Syria, on Saturday was a member of the Syrian government’s security forces, according to the Syrian Interior Ministry.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) first reported that the attacker was a member of the security forces and called for the Syrian government, which is led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, an offshoot of al-Qaeda, to get rid of members who have an “ISIS ideology.”

The Syrian Interior Ministry claimed that, before the attack, Syrian authorities had “decided to fire him” for having “extremist Islamist ideology” and had planned to do so on Sunday. “We discovered him in December and were going to dismiss him, but we didn’t make it in time because it was a holiday,” said ministry spokesman Nour al-Din al-Baba, according to The Cradle.

A Syrian security official told AFP that the attacker had been in the security forces “for more than 10 months and was posted to several cities before being transferred to Palmyra.”

According to Wael Essam, a Palestinian journalist who has covered the conflict in Syria for many years, the perpetrator has been identified as Tariq Satouf al-Hamd from the Aleppo countryside. Essam said that al-Hamd was previously a member of ISIS, but after the fall of former President Bashar al-Assad, he traveled to Idlib, the former home base of HTS, and joined the General Security.

The attack occurred when US military officers were meeting with Syrian Interior Ministry officials while US and Syrian troops stood guard at a base near the city of Palmyra. According to The Wall Street Journal, a lone gunman appeared in a window and opened fire on the US and Syrian soldiers, and he was pursued by Syrian troops and killed. However, according to Essam’s report, the attacker blew himself up.

“The attacker tried to reach the meeting room in the headquarters of the General Security in Palmyra (formerly the Military Security headquarters) where senior officers are present, and in the corridor he clashed with the American guards and the translator and blew himself up,” Essam wrote on X.

Essam also suggested that other members of the Syrian security forces were involved in the attack. “Security sources confirmed to me that Syrian intelligence, along with the Coalition forces, arrested six elements from the General Security at the headquarters in Palmyra, accused of coordinating the operation with him, and it is said that they are from the group that moved with him from the desert to the General Security in Idlib,” he said.

He added that Syrian authorities were “unable to identify his previous affiliation with the organization (ISIS), and there are hundreds like him, due to the large numbers who joined and which the security apparatus needed after the fall of the regime.”

President Trump and other US officials have called the incident an “ISIS attack” and have left out the detail that the perpetrator was a member of the Syrian military, which the US has allied itself with despite HTS’s al-Qaeda past, and as of Sunday, ISIS hasn’t taken credit for the shooting.

“This was an ISIS attack against the US, and Syria, in a very dangerous part of Syria, that is not fully controlled by them,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

He added that Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa is “extremely angry” about the attack. Trump recently hosted Sharaa at the White House despite his past as an al-Qaeda leader and ally of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the founder of ISIS.

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Members of a US-led coalition delegation and Syrian security forces were injured in a shooting near Palmyra while on a mission related to plans to fight ISIS, reports Al Jazeera.

US helicopters evacuated the wounded to the al-Tanf base.

An American soldier was wounded in gunfire targeting a U.S. delegation in central Syria, reported AFP

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