MOSCOW — Four Russian nationals, and perhaps dozens more, were killed in fighting between pro-government forces in eastern Syria and members of the US-led coalition fighting the Islamic State, according to Russian and Syrian officials.
A Syrian military officer said that about 100 Syrian soldiers had been killed on Feb. 7 and 8, but news about Russian casualties has dribbled out slowly, through Russian news organizations and social media.
Much about the attack and the associated casualties has been obscured in the fog of war. For reasons that remain unclear, Syrian government troops and some Russian nationals appear to have attacked a coalition position, near Al Tabiyeh, Syria.
The attack occurred in the vicinity of Deir el-Zour, a strategic, oil-rich territory that is coveted by the Syrians. Most of the fatalities were attributed to a US airstrike on enemy columns that was called in by US-backed Kurdish soldiers who believed they were under attack.
At no point, a US military spokesman said, was there any chance of direct conflict between US and Russian forces.
“Coalition officials were in regular communication with Russian counterparts before, during and after the thwarted, unprovoked attack,’’ according to Colonel Ryan S. Dillon, a spokesman for the US military. “Russian officials assured coalition officials they would not engage coalition forces in the vicinity.’’
The Kremlin — seeking to play down its involvement in the fighting in Syria and seemingly hoping to avoid escalating tensions with the United States — has sidestepped questions about the episode, even as it faces rare criticism at home over its failure to acknowledge the deaths of Russians in Syria.
It has stressed repeatedly since last Wednesday that no members of the Russian armed forces were killed, and that any Russians fighting alongside the Syrians were mercenaries.
“We only handle the data that concerns Russian forces servicemen,’’ Dmitry Peskov, Kremlin spokesman, said at a news briefing. “We don’t have data about other Russians who could be in Syria.’’
The Kremlin said much the same about the nature of the forces in Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014, however, claiming they were volunteers and men on vacation, only to admit later that they were regular soldiers.
President Vladimir Putin has said at least three times since 2016 that combat operations in Syria were winding down. Yet there are hundreds if not thousands of contract soldiers in Syria whom the Russian government has never acknowledged.
They were deployed both to help keep the cost down and to avoid reports of casualties, especially with a March presidential election approaching. Though the Kremlin enacted a law during the Ukraine crisis in 2015 to make battlefield casualties a secret, the funerals for regular soldiers killed in combat need to be more official than those for mercenaries, and are thus difficult to hide.
