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The Russian military group in Syria had been quietly coordinating with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on long-term plans to pressure the United States to withdraw its forces from the country, a Pentagon official said on July 14.
“There’s a confluence of interests between those three groups, the Iranians, the Russians and the Syrians,” the unnamed official told Al-Monitor.
“I see evidence of operational-level planning between mid-level Quds Force leadership that’s operating in Syria [and] Russian forces that are operating in Syria,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence.
The official described the cooperation as “collaborative planning, collaborative understanding and intelligence sharing” at the “mid-level to upper echelon” of the respective Russian and Iranians in Syria.
“Frankly, [it’s] the same sorts of things that we would do with our partners in the face of something we were trying to accomplish,” the official said. “We see them doing that on their side, as they try to think about how they sync the different things that different arms of theirs are doing in order to put that pressure on us.”
The U.S. maintains some 900 troops in Syria under the pretext of fighting ISIS. The troops are deployed between key oil and gas fields in the northeastern governorates of Deir Ezzor and al-Hasakah and a garrison blocking a strategic international highway in the southeastern area of al-Tanf. Damascus does not approve of this presence and consider it to be an occupation.
The same Pentagon official told reporters that a Russian surveillance aircraft flew “for an extended period of time” on July 14 over al-Tanf garrison, in whan he described as an intelligence collecting mission.
The aircraft, an Antonov An-30, flew over the garrison, the official said, flying back and forth several times over the base and the surrounding area.
“They continue to undertake activities that are very concerning to us,” CNN quotes the official as saying.
The official admitted that U.S. forces couldn’t intercept the aircraft in time. He said that the U.S. has daily flight patterns determined by how many fighters are available, and tankers to refuel the fighters, as well as activity in Syria and Iraq and where they’re needed.
These flight schedules are routinely changed so that military patterns are not predictable, the official said, so the Russians would not have known in advance about it.
In what appears to be a response to these accusations, Rear Admiral Oleg Gurinov, deputy chief of the Russian Center for Reconciliation in Syria, said on July 14 that fighters from the U.S. and its allies violated Syria’s airspace over al-Tanf five times during the past day.
“A pair of the coalition’s F-16 fighter jets, a pair of Typhoon combat aircraft, and one MC-12 plane again violated Syria’s airspace in the al-Tanf area, across which international air routes run, five times during the day,” he said.
According to Gurinov, actions of the U.S. and its allies create risks of air accidents with civilian planes. The commander also reported fourteen violations of the deconfliction protocols over Syria, agreed upon on 9 December 2019, by American drones.
Tensions between U.S. and Russian forces in Syria have been mounting since the start of the special military operation in Ukraine. Earlier this month, both sides exchanged accusations about violating the deconfliction protocols over the country on multiple occasions.
The recent escalation is mainly the result of U.S. attempts to expand its operations over Syria without any coordination with the country’s government, or the Russian military group there. While the U.S. claims that these operations are directed against ISIS, it is more likely that intelligence collection is the main purpose.
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