Tasnim News – A pair of American drones crashed following a mid-air collision in Syria, destroying both unmanned aerial vehicles, a report said.
The cause and exact circumstances of the smash-up remain unclear, however, leaving rumors to swirl, the Military Times reported.
The alleged collision took place over the Idlib province on Tuesday, an anonymous defense official told the Times, though offered few other details about the mishap, declining to confirm what caused the crash or what type of drones were involved. Whether the aircraft were fired upon at any point during the incident is also not known, the official said.
Photos and videos circulating online – which show debris falling from the sky and flaming wreckage on the ground – indicate that at least one of the craft was an American MQ-9 Reaper drone, used for both surveillance and armed missions.
With no official explanation for the incident, however, speculation was rife on social media, with some suggesting the drones were shot down by Turkish-backed militants, while others posited that a Russian drone had been downed, despite the report pinning both craft as American.
Though Damascus has repeatedly slammed the American presence in Syria as illegal and a violation of the country’s sovereignty, Washington continues military operations in several regions, carrying out intermittent strikes around Idlib and embedding soldiers with Arab and Kurdish proxy groups in the south and northeast.
