The United States and Russia have both deployed ground troops in Syria, ravaged by war since 2011, where each of the two countries supports an opposing camp. Moscow’s war in Ukraine since February has further heightened tensions with Washington.
But on Saturday morning, an American patrol and another Russian passed each other on an oil field near the town of Al-Qahtaniyah, in the province of Hassaké, in northeastern Syria, according to AFP correspondents. .
This is not the first time that the paths of these armored vehicles meet, in this region held by the Kurds. But this time, the convoys greeted each other in a friendly way instead of passing one another without stopping.
The soldiers, standing side by side, posed for photos, smiling, weapons pointed at the ground.
A Russian and an American burst out laughing during a conversation. Several soldiers even exchanged patches from their uniforms.
“It’s a very rare moment,” observes Samuel Ramani, a researcher in international relations at the British University of Oxford. “It’s a sign that Russia and the United States want ‘deconfliction’ in Syria.”
Deconfliction refers to communication channels set up in 2015 to prevent confrontations between the various forces present on the ground and in the Syrian sky.
American soldiers have been on Syrian soil since 2014, as part of an international coalition to support Kurdish forces in their fight against jihadists from the Islamic State (IS) group.
The Russian army has been militarily engaged since 2015 alongside the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad. It deployed at the end of 2019 in northeastern Syria, when Damascus came to the rescue of Kurdish forces, faced with an offensive from neighboring Turkey.
The presence of Russian troops also helped to avoid a confrontation between US forces and those of the Syrian regime.
