BEIRUT (AP) — A man who carried out an attack in Syria that killed three American citizens joined Syria’s internal security forces as a base guard two months earlier and was recently reassigned amid suspicions he may be affiliated with the Islamic State group, a Syrian official told The Associated Press on Sunday.
Saturday’s attack in the Syrian desert near the historic city of Palmyra killed two American servicemen and one American civilian and wounded three others. It also wounded three members of the Syrian security forces who clashed with the gunman, Interior Ministry spokesman Nour al-Din al-Baba said.
Al-Baba said Syria’s new authorities faced a shortage of security personnel and had to recruit quickly after the unexpected success of a rebel offensive last year that aimed to capture the northern city of Aleppo but ended up toppling the government of former President Bashar Assad.
“We were shocked that in 11 days we took all of Syria and that put a huge responsibility on us from the security and administration side,” he said.
The attacker was among 5,000 members who recently joined a new division of internal security forces formed in the desert region known as Badiya, one of the places where remnants of the Islamic State extremist group remained active.
The attacker had raised suspicions
Al-Baba said the leadership of the internal security forces recently became suspicious that there was an infiltrator leaking information to IS and began evaluating all members in the Badiya area.
The investigation last week raised suspicions about the man who later carried out the attack, but officials decided to monitor him further for several days to try to determine if he was an active IS member and identify the network he was communicating with, if so, al-Baba said. He did not name the attacker.
At the same time, as a “precautionary measure,” he said, the man was reassigned to guard equipment at the base in a location where he would be further from management and any patrols by U.S.-led coalition forces.
On Saturday, the man stormed a meeting between US and Syrian security officials who were having lunch together and opened fire after clashing with Syrian guards, al-Baba said. The attacker was shot and killed at the scene.
Al-Baba acknowledged the incident was “a major security breach” but said in the year since Assad’s fall “there have been far more successes than failures” by security forces.
Following the shooting, he said, the Syrian army and internal security forces “launched a wide area in the Badiya region” and destroyed a number of suspected IS cells.
A delicate partnership
The incident comes at a sensitive time as the US military expands its cooperation with Syrian security forces.
The US has had forces on the ground in Syria for more than a decade with a stated mission to fight Islamic State, with about 900 troops there today.
Before Assad’s ouster, Washington had no diplomatic relations with Damascus, and the US military did not work directly with the Syrian military. Its main partner at the time was the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces in the country’s northeast.
That has changed in the last year. Ties have warmed between the administrations of US President Donald Trump and Syrian interim President Ahmad al-Sharaa, the former leader of an Islamist insurgent group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which has been classified by Washington as a terrorist organization.
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 entry into the global coalition against the Islamic State, joining 89 other countries that have pledged to fight the group.
US officials have vowed retaliation against IS for the attack, but have not publicly commented on whether 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 IS and are an unreliable partner.
Mouaz Moustafa, executive director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, an advocacy group that seeks to build closer relations between Washington and Damascus, said it was unfair.
Despite both having Islamist roots, HTS and IS have been enemies and often clashed over the past decade.
Among former members of HTS and allied groups, Moustafa said: “It is a fact that even those who hold the most fundamentalist beliefs, the most conservative of the fighters, have a vehement hatred of ISIS.”
“The coalition between the United States and Syria is the most important partnership in the global fight against ISIS because only Syria has the expertise and experience to deal with this,” he said.