BEIRUT — U.S. forces ferried by helicopter Sunday crossed five miles into Syria from Iraq and launched a commando raid that left at least eight people dead, Syrian news outlets and sources reported.
Syria has long been a conduit for foreign fighters attempting to slip into Iraq to attack U.S. troops. American officials say that military action in Iraq has reduced the number of those fighters. And tense relations between Damascus and the Iraqi government have improved enough that this month Syria sent an ambassador to Baghdad for the first time since the early 1980s.
But U.S. officials complain that militants still are able to operate openly in Syria, and that the Damascus government needs to do more to rein them in. They accuse fighters who filtered across the Syrian border of fomenting trouble recently in the northern city of Mosul, and of an attack in May that killed 11 Iraqi policemen.
Details of the attack Sunday were sketchy. A military officer in Iraq confirmed that U.S. forces had conducted a raid into Syria, but declined to provide more information. In Washington, several military representatives who were asked about the operation did not deny that a raid had taken place. Although they would not confirm the attack, they used language typically employed after raids conducted by secretive special operations forces.
In the waning days of the Bush administration, the U.S. has shown a greater willingness to launch cross-border clandestine operations in another military theater, Pakistan, to protect U.S. troops in neighboring Afghanistan or to capture or kill Islamic militants.
The official Syrian Arab News Agency said U.S. military helicopters attacked the Sukkariyeh Farm near the town of Abu Kamal. The area is about 60 miles southeast of Dayr az Zawr, which is considered a haven for Sunni Arab militants that infiltrate Iraq and is near the site of a Sept. 6, 2007, Israeli airstrike on what U.S. officials have alleged was a plutonium plant built with the assistance of North Korea.
The news agency said four helicopters crossed into Syrian airspace about 4:45 p.m. local time and fired on people who appeared to be laborers at their jobs on the second day of the Syrian workweek. It said a man named Daoud Mohammed Abdullah, his wife and four of his sons were killed. The two other victims were not immediately identified.
"All victims were civilians," Syria's Dunya private television said.
