The attack Saturday in the Syrian desert near the historic city of Palmyra killed two U.S. service members and one American civilian and wounded three others. It also wounded three members of the Syrian security forces who clashed with the gunman, interior ministry spokesperson Nour al-Din al-Baba said.
Al-Baba said that Syria's new authorities had faced shortages in security personnel and had to recruit rapidly after the unexpected success of a rebel offensive last year that intended to capture the northern city of Aleppo but ended up overthrowing the government of former President Bashar Assad.
“We were shocked that in 11 days we took all of Syria and that put a huge responsibility in front of us from the security and administration sides,” he said.
The attacker was among 5,000 members who recently joined a new division in the internal security forces formed in the desert region known as the Badiya, one of the places where remnants of the Islamic State extremist group have remained active.
Attacker had raised suspicions
Al-Baba said the internal security forces’ leadership had recently become suspicious that there was an infiltrator leaking information to IS and began evaluating all members in the Badiya area.
The probe raised suspicions last week about the man who later carried out the attack, but officials decided to continue monitoring him for a few days to try to determine if he was an active member of IS and to identify the network he was communicating with if so, al-Baba said. He did not name the attacker.
At the same time, as a “precautionary measure,” he said, the man was reassigned to guard equipment at the base at a location where he would be farther from the leadership and from any patrols by U.S.-led coalition forces.
On Saturday, the man stormed a meeting between U.S. and Syrian security officials who were having lunch together and opened fire after clashing with Syrian guards, al-Baba said. The attacker was shot and killed at the scene.
Al-Baba acknowledged that the incident was “a major security breach” but said that in the year since Assad’s fall “there have been many more successes than failures” by security forces.
In the wake of the shooting, he said, the Syrian army and internal security forces “launched wide-ranging sweeps of the Badiya region” and broke up a number of alleged IS cells. The interior ministry said in a statement later that five suspects were arrested in the city of Palmyra.
