A senior U.S. general appears to have confirmed that hundreds of Russians fought – and died – in a major battle against American forces and their local counterparts in Syria. More importantly, U.S. Army Brigadier General Jonathan Braga, director of operations for the main U.S. military task force in charge of operations in Iraq and Syria, said he feared the situation could have escalated into an all-out conflict with Russia, something we at The War Zone have warned repeatedly is becoming a worryingly realistic possibility.
Braga gave the surprisingly candid account of what had happened to NBC's Richard Engel, who traveled with the general to visit the exact site of the incident in Syria and to see what the U.S. military was doing to improve its defensive posture.
The skirmish occurred on Feb. 7, 2018 when forces aligned with Syria's dictator Bashar Al Assad, backed by Russian mercenaries from a shadowy company called Wagner, which are possibly under the direct control of the Kremlin, launched an attack on U.S. forces and members of the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, a predominately Kurdish group, in eastern Syria. The opposing force consisted of tanks and heavy artillery.
After a massive American counter-attack involving air and artillery strikes beat back the opposing troops, reports emerged afterwards suggesting that as many as 200 Russians had died in the engagement
The initial attack "led to immediate phone conversations with the Russians to inquire what was going on, to cease this if they had any knowledge of this," Braga told Engel. The Russians responded by saying "those are not our forces and at that time it was confusing," the general added.
Based on the segments of the interview that NBC has released so far, Braga does not specifically say the Russian government ordered the operation or otherwise had any direct involvement in it. He does, however, clearly say the U.S. government believes it killed a significant number of Russian nationals during the battle and unequivocally says he was concerned that the situation could have spiraled into a much more serious conflagration.
While we don't know what the reason for the shift in tone might be, Braga's new interview with NBC does follow a fiery speech from Russian President Vladimir Putin on March 1, 2018, in which he unveiled a host of new strategic weapons and implicitly threatened the United State and its allies. It also comes after a high-profile poisoning of a former Russian intelligence officer in the United Kingdom, which both the U.K. and American governments say was a Kremlin-ordered assassination attempt.
