I wonder how you say “oops!” in Arabic:
Syrian state-run TV and witnesses said Sunday that American helicopters attacked an area close to the Iraqi border zone, killing at least nine people.
Local residents in a Syrian border town said that American forces killed seven men in a helicopter-borne commando attack inside Syrian territory. State-run TV later raised the number of dead to eight.
Doctors in the town of Al-Sukkariya, some eight kilometers from the Iraqi border, said seven corpses and four wounded had been delivered to a nearby clinic after the attack.An official Syrian spokesman confirmed the attack.
The eyewitness accounts said that four helicopters were involved in the operation, with two of the helicopters landing in the town and eight American soldiers disembarking. The eyewitnesses said that the seven killed men were supposedly construction workers.
Ok, so I think the key here is that reports are coming from the Syrian state-run TV. I’ll keep an eye on this to see how it progresses.
UPDATE:
Holy shit. Interesting that Bush gave the green light on this one. Don’t you think it could have waited till, say, mid-next week?! Can someone smell that “international test” on the horizon?
A U.S. military official said the raid by special forces targeted the network of al-Qaida-linked foreign fighters moving through Syria into Iraq. The Americans have been unable to shut the network down in the area because Syria was out of the military’s reach.
“We are taking matters into our own hands,” the official told The Associated Press in Washington, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the political sensitivity of cross-border raids.
[source: MSNBC]
