June 30, 2023
By Ishaan Tharoor
foreign affairs columnist at The Washington Post,
The single bloodiest clash between U.S. and Russian forces since the Cold War took place in early February 2018. In the depths of the Syrian night, near the dusty banks of the Euphrates River, a small force of U.S. Marines and Green Berets found themselves besieged by a larger contingent of pro-Syrian regime forces, including a significant detachment of Russian mercenaries. The battle centered around a U.S. outpost by the Conoco gas plant near Deir al-Zour in northeastern Syria.
A company of some 300 to 500 pro-Syrian regime troops advanced on the refinery, equipped with heavy weapons including armored vehicles and tanks. Over an intense four-hour gunfight, the attackers pinned down U.S. forces under a barrage of artillery and mortar rounds. Earlier this year, investigative reporter Kevin Maurer sketched a compelling account of the battle, based on firsthand accounts from a number of U.S. Special Forces personnel involved in the fight, and he detailed the grim horror that set in as Russian tanks slowly motored into position.
“They called the team a pirate ship because if anything happened, they were all going down together,” Maurer wrote of the U.S. combatants. “And now facing tanks, that was a real chance. Despite recent showings on the battlefields of Ukraine, the tank is still an apex predator on the battlefield. The American Special Forces didn’t have a weapon that could stop them.”
Instead, U.S. air power entered the fray and presided over a stunning slaughter. Reaper drones, F-22 stealth jets, B-52 bombers and Apache helicopter gunships took out the attacking force’s antiaircraft capability and then mowed them down. The bulk of the Russian tanks and artillery were destroyed, and hundreds of Syrian and Russian fighters were believed killed. Not one U.S. casualty was sustained.
“I’m a full believer that without the air that responded to us on station, we all would’ve been a bunch of grease stains on the earth in a line in an oil field in Syria,” one of the Special Forces officers told Maurer.
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After leading a short-lived mutiny over the weekend, Wagner chief Yevgeniy Prigozhin defended his actions on June 26 in a Telegram audio message. (Video: Reuters)
Why bring up this episode from five years ago? Because the mercenaries involved belonged to the Wagner Group, led by the now-exiled Yevgeniy Prigozhin. Their operations then, as they do now, reflected the outsize, shadowy role Wagner played in the Kremlin’s foreign policy — as a proxy actor that furthered Moscow’s interests in hot spots in Ukraine, Syria and various conflicts in Africa with both ruthlessness and a degree of plausible deniability for the Russian government.
And the incident also offered an early indication of the tensions to come between Prigozhin and Russia’s military leadership. The apparent loss of dozens of Wagner fighters in a single night in Syria allegedly infuriated Prigozhin, who earlier this month put out his account of the 2018 events on the social media platform Telegram. In his telling, the Wagner expedition was supposed to be the advance force of an “anti-ISIS” operation that would secure control over the plant and its environs with air support from the Russian military. But that support never came, and Prigozhin was left fuming at Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Russian Gen. Valery Gerasimov for allowing his fighters to become U.S. cannon fodder.
According to U.S. officials in 2018, their Russian counterparts denied involvement in the battle and, during emergency discussions as the fighting raged, assented to the use of American air power on the scene. A U.S. official told my colleagues five years ago that it was “striking how the Russians themselves have been quick to distance themselves” from what he described as an operation “under Syrian command and in response to Syrian directive.”
“The Russian high command in Syria assured us it was not their people,” Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told senators in testimony in April 2018. He said he directed Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “for the [attacking] force, then, to be annihilated.”
A few weeks after the battle, my colleagues reported on how, despite Russian denials, Prigozhin did have close contact with the Kremlin and appeared to be coordinating operations with its officials. It was an initial peek into the vast influence network he once operated, spanning Russian disinformation operations online to boots on the ground in wars in countries like Libya and the Central African Republic.
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Prigozhin’s feud with Shoigu and Gerasimov flared in the last half year, as he raged at their perceived incompetence in the handling of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This past weekend, he launched Wagner’s short-lived rebellion against Russia’s military leadership, prompting a crisis for Russian President Vladimir Putin that the Kremlin is still struggling to resolve. Shoigu and Gerasimov, Putin allies, remain in their posts.
Prigozhin was allowed to leave for exile in Belarus, but it appears the Kremlin may be moving to defang the mercenary company it allowed to thrive. On Thursday, Russian reports suggested that Russian authorities had arrested Air Force commander Gen. Sergei Surovikin, who had, for a time, led operations in Ukraine as well as the earlier Russian war effort in Syria, for alleged links to Wagner and Prigozhin and abetting the mutiny.
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The reason for Wagner’s ill-fated 2018 operation in Syria was likely born out of greed. The company has built a stream of revenue from guarding lucrative sites like oil fields and gold mines. For now, as Moscow figures out what to do with the mercenaries’ footprint, a kind of tacit status quo remains in place in Syria.
“Wagner is still deployed in resource-rich areas where [Syrian President Bashar al-]Assad’s forces are nominally in control but rely on help from Russian military and police units,” noted Anna Borshchevskaya, Ben Fishman and Andrew Tabler of Washington Institute for Near East Policy, in a memo published Thursday. “These include Syria’s largest natural gas and oil fields (Shaer, al-Mahr, Jazar, and Jihar), where some reports indicate that Wagner has used a shell company called Evro Polis to receive up to a quarter of the production profits. The Assad regime apparently granted Wagner this cut because the group recaptured the fields from the Islamic State and has continued to guard them against opposition raids. Any changes in this arrangement would reveal much about the balance of Russian control in Syria.”
By Ishaan Tharoor is a foreign affairs columnist at The Washington Post, where he authors the Today's WorldView newsletter and column. In 2021, he won the Arthur Ross Media Award in Commentary from the American Academy of Diplomacy. He previously was a senior editor and correspondent at Time magazine, based first in Hong Kong and later in New York. Twitter
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