Russian jets bombed an area of northern Syria Tuesday and as a result killed an undisclosed number of U.S.-backed Syrian fighters, the Pentagon said Wednesday.
Army Lt. Gen. Stephen Townsend, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, indicated to reporters that he believed Russia’s actions were a mistake created by confusion on the ground about which troops were occupying which positions.
“Yesterday we had some Russian aircraft and regime aircraft bomb some villages that I believe they thought were held by ISIS,” he said.
“Yet, they were actually — on the ground were some of our Syrian Arab Coalition forces. They had seen ISIS move out of the area in advance of the — the regime and the Turks’ advance. The ISIS fighters withdrew, and the Syrian Arab Coalition fighters advanced into those villages.”
The U.S. had special operations troops serving as advisers about four or five kilometers away who were able to contact the Russians through an established deconfliction channel to call the strikes off, Townsend said.
Townsend described what he called a “very complicated battlefield situation” in the area near al-Bab where three armies and an enemy force have all converged within the same grid square.
“We have YPG, Syrian Democratic Force fighters, and Syrian Arab Coalition fighters also right bumping up against each other there,” he said. “And then here in the last 48 hours, we’ve seen Syrian regime forces advance through ISIS-held villages to essentially rifle-range or hand-grenade range with Syrian Arab Coalition fighters holding the area around Manbij.”
He said the different forces were all within “hand grenade or rifle range of each other.”
While Townsend said there were casualties among the Syrian forces, including some deaths, he declined to provide a number.
The Russian Defense Ministry shot back, saying Russian and regime aircraft weren’t responsible for airstrikes in the area.
“To avoid any incidents, the US representative has provided exact coordinates of the US-backed opposition forces in the region to a Russian officer,” the ministry said, according to the Kremlin-backed Russia Today.
“Not a single air strike on the regions specified by the US side was conducted by Russian or Syrian air forces,” it said.
