Two US army soldiers and one American civilian interpreter have been killed and several other people wounded in an ambush on Saturday by the Islamic State group in central Syria, the Pentagon said.
The attack on US troops in Palmyra is the first to inflict casualties since the fall of the former Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, a year ago.
“We mourn the loss of three great patriots in Syria,” Donald Trump told reporters as he left the White House to attend the army-navy football game in Baltimore. “We also have three wounded. They seem to be doing pretty well.”
“This was an Isis attack on us and Syria,” Trump added. “We will retaliate.”
“The attack occurred as the soldiers were conducting a key leader engagement,” the Pentagon’s chief spokesperson, Sean Parnell, said in a statement. “Their mission was in support of on-going counter-ISIS / counter-terrorism operations in the region.”
The attacker “was killed by partner forces”, Pete Hegseth, the US defense secretary, wrote on the social media platform X.
Central Command said in a post on X that as a matter of respect for the families and in accordance with defense department policy, the identities of the service members “will be withheld until 24 hours after their next of kin have been notified”.
Syria’s state media and a war monitor reported earlier on Saturday that shots were fired at Syrian and US forces on Saturday during a visit by American troops to the historic central town of Palmyra.
According to the state-run Sana news agency, two members of Syria’s security force and several US service members were wounded. The injured were taken by helicopters to the al-Tanf garrison near the border with Iraq and Jordan.
Sana said the attacker was killed, without providing further details.
Syria’s interior ministry spokesperson, Nour al-Din al-Baba, said a gunman linked to Islamic State opened fire at the gate of a military post. He added that Syrian authorities are looking into whether the gunman was an Islamic State member or only carried its extreme ideology. He denied a report from the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights that the attacker was a security member.
The US has hundreds of troops deployed in eastern Syria as part of a coalition fighting the Islamic State.
Last month, Syria joined the international coalition fighting against the Islamic State as Damascus improves its relations with western countries following last year’s fall of Assad when insurgents captured his seat of power.
The US had no diplomatic relations with Syria under Assad, but ties have warmed since the fall of the five-decade family rule. The interim president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, a former Islamist militant, made a historic visit to Washington last month, where he held talks with Donald Trump.
The Islamic State was defeated in Syria in 2019 but the group’s sleeper cells still carry out deadly attacks in the country. The United Nations says the group still has between 5,000 and 7,000 fighters in Syria and Iraq.
US troops, which have maintained a presence in different parts of Syria – including the al-Tanf garrison in the central province of Homs – to train other forces as part of a broad campaign against the Islamic State, have been targeted in the past. One of the deadliest attacks occurred in 2019 in the northern town of Manbij, when a blast killed two US service members and two American civilians as well as others from Syria while they were conducting a patrol.