Russian aircraft are believed to have destroyed an outpost near the Jordanian border used by British and US special forces.

According to the Wall Street Journal, “alarm bells sounded at the Pentagon and the Ministry of Defence in London” when Russian aircraft bombed a remote garrison used by western special forces in southeastern Syria last month.

The Russian target was a base of operations for American and British forces.

It is understood that a contingent of about 20 British special forces had pulled out of the garrison 24 hours earlier.

Russian pilots had reportedly struck the outpost because they thought it was an Islamic State base.

The pro-opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has claimed that between the initiation of the intervention in September 2015 and February 2016, Russian air strikes have killed 1,000 civilians, including 200 children; the Russian government denies this and these claims cannot be independently verified. Russian military intervention has however produced significant gains for the Syrian Army against Islamic State and rebel forces, including the recapture of Palmyra in March 2016.

At the start of this month, a Russian Mi-35, according to some sources) was shot down by fire from a US-made BGM-71 TOW east of Palmyra, with two Russian pilots confirmed dead. A few days after, Russia announced it had employed strategic Tu-22M3 bombers, for the first time since the partial ceasefire came into force in February, to deliver airstrikes on terrorist targets.

George Allison
George has a degree in Cyber Security from Glasgow Caledonian University and has a keen interest in naval and cyber security matters and has appeared on national radio and television to discuss current events. George is on Twitter at @geoallison

21 COMMENTS

  1. Read all I needed…. 24 hours before it was bombed the British vacated…. do you not thing if it was a strong hold for us to use the Russians took it out before it was taken over …. by the enemy…. seriously some shitty click bait…

    • Either bad Intel or something much worse. This may cause conflict, but it still might not. Since no one was hurt, it might even have Britain and the US call for sharing of more strategic information being shared with Russia. Things aren’t usually as black and white as they seem. Only time will tell what will happen

    • One small thing the article ‘forgot’ (may or may not), the base isn’t American nor British. It was an FSA fully-controlled base, with American and British spec ops regularly make ‘visits’ from and to. While it is no stranger that Russia prioritises FSA targets, one can see this incident as the West slowly pulling out on supporting the opposition rebels, with the clearest identification as intel sharing.

  2. Rather than leave this up in the air (no pun intended) it would be nice to see an update on the report. I don’t like the part ‘believed’. Is it true or not. We are talking super powers here.

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