[World News] U.S.-led coalition air strikes killed dozens of Syrian soldiers on Saturday, Russia and a monitoring group said, putting a U.S.-Russian brokered ceasefire in jeopardy and prompting an emergency U.N. Security Council meeting.The United States military said the coalition stopped the attacks against what it had believed to be Islamic State positions in northeast Syria after Russia informed it that Syrian military personnel and vehicles may have been hit.
A U.S. military official said he was "pretty sure" targets mistakenly hit in the strikes were Syrian forces.
Russia called for an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council after the incident, and diplomats said the 15-member body was due to meet behind closed doors at 7:30 p.m. ET.
Moscow cited the strikes, which allowed Islamic State fighters to briefly overrun a Syrian army position near Deir al-Zor airport, as evidence that the United States was helping the jihadist militants.
"We are reaching a really terrifying conclusion for the whole world: That the White House is defending Islamic State. Now there can be no doubts about that," the RIA Novosti news agency quoted Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova as saying.
She said the strikes threatened to undermine the ceasefire in Syria brokered by Russia, which has been aiding Syria's President Bashar al-Assad in the civil war, and the United States, which has backed some rebel groups.
US conveys 'regret' for anti-ISIS strike that killed Syrian forces, official says (Video)
[Fox] The Obama administration expressed its "regret" Saturday for an airstrike that mistakenly killed Syrian forces, a senior administration official told Fox News, as the U.S. awaited a response from the Assad regime.
The U.S. military halted its air raid against the Islamic State terror group in eastern Syria after learning it struck the Syrian military, a U.S. Central Command official confirmed. The CENTCOM official said the U.S. military was "certain" about the outcome of the strike. Officials had been watching these forces "for a few days" thinking they were ISIS.
"The United States has relayed our regret through the Russian Federation for the unintentional loss of life of Syrian forces," the administration official said. It marked the first known direct American strike on President Bashar Assad's forces.
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“Sixty-two Syrian soldiers were killed and a hundred others were injured in these strikes.”
The Russian military said two F-16 and two A-10 jets flew into Syrian airspace from neighboring Iraq to carry out the strikes.
“Straight after the coalition’s strikes, IS militants launched an offensive,” said the statement, adding that “fierce fighting against the terrorists” ensued nearby.
“If these strikes were due to an error in the target coordinates, that would be a direct consequence of the US’s refusal to coordinate with Russia its fight against the terrorist groups in Syria,” it said.
The IS-affiliated Amaq news outlet said IS had seized the hill where the airstrike took place.