American aircraft reportedly attacked Iranian-backed fighters in Syria as a renewed civil war threatened to engulf the country.
Aircraft – including what appeared to be an American A-10 Warthog ground attack jet – were filmed conducting low-level strikes in the eastern province of Deir Ezzor on Tuesday.
The US said the operation was carried out in self defence against threats posed to coalition forces in the region, adding that the strike was not connected to the growing conflict spreading across the north-west of the country.
It came as the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), an American-backed group that allied with Western governments to defeat Islamic State in 2019, said it had captured a number of villages from Syrian government forces on the Eastern bank of the Euphrates.
The development underlines the multiple conflicts reignited by last week’s surprise rebel offensive in the north-west of the country.
Iran is trying to rush militia men from neighbouring Iraq to help its ally, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, push back the Islamist-led rebel alliance in the north-west of Syria.
The villages in the south-east attacked by the SDF’s Arab-dominated Deir Ezzor military council have been used by regime and Iranian-backed militias to attack the SDF and nearby US bases, said Charles Lister, director of the Syria programme at the Middle East Institute, a Washington-based think tank.
The rebels, led by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) jihadist group and the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA), captured Aleppo and attacked the province of Homs in an offensive that began on Wednesday last week.
The rebels have since continued to make rapid advances into the country, with the country’s state news agency reporting clashes on Tuesday between Assad’s forces and the rebels in the Hama countryside – an area roughly 70 miles south of Aleppo and 110 miles north of the capital of Damascus.
The Rojava Information Centre, a news outlet aligned with the authorities in Kurdish-controlled areas, said areas of Aleppo that have maintained autonomy from either side were now surrounded by HTS forces.
‘Turkey settling scores’
The SNA also clashed with the SDF, which controls a mostly Kurdish-inhabited swathe of territory in the north of the country, prompting allegations that Turkey was using the chaos as an opportunity to settle scores with the group.
On Nov 26 the United States said it attacked an Iranian-aligned militia weapons storage facility in response to an attack on US forces in the area.
Earlier on Tuesday, Russian navy ships were spotted leaving the Kremlin’s crucial seaport in the Mediterranean as the civil war threatens to engulf it.
Naval analyst H I Sutton said Russia’s Tartus naval base in Syria was now under threat from rebel attack as the fast-moving front line closed in.
“The dramatic shift in the front lines in Syria now puts the base at risk. There are indications that Russia may be evacuating its naval vessels,” he said.
A Russian navy missile ship at Tartus naval base in Syria in 2019 – AP
The Tartus naval base is important for Russia because it is its only Mediterranean “replenishment and repair point”. It has also been used as the dropping-off point for Russian special forces to enter the Syrian conflict.
So important is Tartus to the Russian navy that in 2017, Putin ordered its expansion.
But Mr Sutton said two of Russia’s five naval ships had now left the port. Russia also has a submarine based at Tartus. This “is the first visible sign that Russia is moving valuable assets out of the country,” he said.
Russia has been allied to Syria’s central government since 2015 when it first deployed soldiers, and on Monday, Vladimir Putin made his first comment on the intensifying fighting, telling his Iranian counterpart that he was 100 per cent behind Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.
The Russian air force has also been bombing rebel positions, killing hundreds of fighters, in an effort to slow their advance.
Writing on X, formerly Twitter, naval analyst Droxford Maritime agreed “there is a realistic possibility” the departure of Russian naval ships was linked to renewed fighting in Syria.
He also said one of the ships spotted leaving Tartus was the Yelnya, a Project 169 Altay class oiler which has been described as a “valuable asset and important to maintaining Russia’s force in the Mediterranean”.
The port is also considered a critical part of the supply link for Russia’s support for military strongman General Khalifa Haftar, who dominates the eastern part of war-torn Libya.
Jalel Harchaoui, of the Royal United Services Institute, a think tank, said if the Kremlin did give up Tartus, it would have a knock-on effect on its strategies in Libya, which have been designed to rival the West.
“Any potential loss by Moscow of these ports would reshape the fate of the Haftar family,” he said.
A satellite image of Tartus in 2022 – Planet Labs PBC
Set up as a Soviet naval base in 1971, Tartus was bulked up in 2012, being turned into Russia’s main overseas naval base.
Since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, it has taken on increased significance after Putin ordered his naval forces to adopt an aggressive posture to deter any Nato forces from using the Mediterranean Sea to interfere with his war.
Mr Sutton also said if Russia did abandon the naval base it would be complicated for it to get its ships back to a friendly port and the Kremlin may order an “attempt on the Black Sea route again”.
“If so, it will expose itself to Ukraine’s surface drones,” he said.
As well as pulling its ships out of the Tartus naval base, Russian forces have reportedly withdrawn from two other bases near Aleppo, which rebel forces captured on Friday. One of them is the Hama Air Base, which is seen as a lynchpin site.
Putin has also sacked the general commanding Russian forces in Syria.
