Australian jets involved in air strikes that killed Syrian troops

Australia has said its warplanes took part in US-led air strikes in eastern Syria that mistakenly killed Syrian army troops in an incident threatening to wreck an already tenuous ceasefire before it is a week old.

Russia’s military said it was told by the Syrian army that at least 62 soldiers were killed in the attack on a government position near Deir ez-Zour, with more than 100 wounded. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 90 soldiers were killed.

The first air strikes on Aleppo since the ceasefire began last Monday evening were reported on Sunday.

An Australian defence department statement said its jets had targeted fighters they thought to be members of Islamic State, the jihadist faction also known as Isis.

“Overnight, coalition aircraft were conducting air strikes in eastern Syria against what was believed to be a Daesh [Islamic State] fighting position that the coalition had been tracking for some time,” the statement said.

“However, shortly after the bombing commenced, Russian officials advised the Combined Air Operations Centre that the targets may have been Syrian military personnel.

“While Syria remains a dynamic and complex operating environment, Australia would never intentionally target a known Syrian military unit or actively support [Islamic State],” it said, offering condolences to the families of the dead and pledging to co-operate with a US inquiry.

The US has also offered condolences and insisted the air strikes were a mistake. It said it had targeted Tharda mountain where a Syrian government offensive was seeking to capture Islamic State positions overlooking the Deir ez-Zour military airport.

Rejection

Damascus claimed it had succeeded in taking Tharda despite the US bombing, and rejected Washington’s insistence that it hit Syrian troops in error. A foreign ministry statement said Syrian positions had been repeatedly attacked in strikes that were “on purpose and planned in advance”.

Russia warned that the incident puts a “very big question mark” over the future of a precarious ceasefire agreed by Washington and Moscow, and a strongly worded foreign ministry statement on Sunday said the strikes were “on the boundary between criminal negligence and direct connivance with Islamic State terrorists”.

It said the incident was a result of Washington’s “stubborn refusal” to co-operate with Moscow in fighting Isis, the al-Nusra Front – now renamed Jabhat Fateh al Sham – and “other terrorist groups”.