A General Atomics MQ-1C Gray Eagle armed with AGM-114 Hellfire missiles. (Photo Credit: U.S. Army)
United States-led coalition warplanes violated deconfliction protocols over Syria 14 times in the last 24 hours, Rear Admiral Oleg Gurinov, deputy head of the Russian Center for Reconciliation in Syria, announced on July 15.
“During the day, 14 cases of violations of the deconfliction protocols of December 9, 2019 were recorded, related to flights of unmanned aerial vehicles not coordinated with the Russian side by the so-called international anti-terrorist coalition led by the U.S.,” the commander said during his daily briefing.
Gurinov added that two British Typhoon and two French Rafale fighter jets as well as one American MQ-1C drone had violated the airspace over the southeastern Syrian area of al-Tanf, through which international air routes pass.
A day earlier, a Pentagon official claimed that 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.
The official also acknowledge that the U.S.-led coalition failed to intercept a Russian intelligence aircraft that flew directly over its garrison in al-Tanf.
In addition, the unnamed official said the U.S. is considering a number of military options to address what he called “Russian aggression” over Syria. The official declined to provide further detail. However, he stressed that the U.S. will not cede any territory and will continue to fly in the western part of the country on “anti-ISIS missions.”
The U.S.-led coalition operates in Syria under the pretext of fighting ISIS without any authorization from the government in Damascus.
The repeated aerial violations by the coalition pose a real threat to civilian aviation over Syria and could eventually cause a dangerous incident.
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