U.S. Central Command said Saturday that two American service members and one civilian were killed in an ambush while on patrol near Palmyra, Syria.
The Pentagon initially attributed the attack to ISIS while the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights later reported that the perpetrator was a member of the Syrian security forces.
In a post on X, CENTCOM declined to identify the victims, saying additional information would be released when available. In a statement posted to Truth Social after the attack, President Trump announced that there would be “very serious retaliation.”
The incident sparked questions about the size and mission of U.S. forces operating in Syria. While the Biden and Trump administrations have both described the deployment as limited, senior officials have previously acknowledged that official troop figures are undercounts.
In a 2020 interview, then-U.S. envoy to Syria James Jeffrey said he had routinely obscured actual troop numbers following a withdrawal ordered by President Donald Trump. “We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there,” Jeffrey said, adding that the true number of U.S. forces in northeast Syria was “a lot more than” the roughly 200 troops Trump initially agreed to leave in 2019. “What Syria withdrawal? There was never a Syria withdrawal,” Jeffrey said at the time.
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