This is sure interesting: fighting inside Syria between the Syrian military and U.S. forces.
A series of clashes in the past year between U.S. and Syrian troops, including a prolonged firefight this summer that killed several Syrians, has raised the prospect that cross-border military operations may become a new front in the Iraq war, according to current and former military and government officials.Posted by Alan at October 15, 2005 05:47 PMThe firefight, between Army Rangers and Syrian troops along the border with Iraq, was the most serious of the conflicts with President Bashar al-Assad's forces, according to U.S. and Syrian officials.
One of Bush's most senior aides, who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject, said that so far U.S. military forces in Iraq had moved right up to the border to cut off the entry of insurgents, but he insisted that they had refrained from going over it.
But other officials, who say they got their information in the field or by talking to Special Operations commanders, say that as U.S. efforts to cut off the flow of fighters have intensified, those operations have spilled over the border — sometimes by accident, sometimes by design.
Some current and former officials add that the U.S. military is considering plans to conduct special operations inside Syria, using small covert teams for intelligence gathering.
Increasingly, officials say, Syria is to the Iraq war what Cambodia was during the Vietnam War: a sanctuary for fighters, money and supplies to flow over the border and, ultimately, a place for a shadow struggle.
In the summer firefight, several Syrian troops were killed, leading to a protest from the Syrian government to the U.S. Embassy in Damascus, according to U.S. and Syrian officials.
A military official who spoke with some of the Rangers who took part in the incident said they had described it as an intense firefight, although it could not be learned whether there had been any U.S. casualties, nor could the exact location of the clash be learned.