Syrian government says US-led coalition hit army camp killing three soldiers

The Syrian government has accused the United States of “aggression” after at least three regime soldiers were killed in airstrike that Damascus has blamed on the American-led alliance fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Isil).

Three Syrian soldiers were killed and another 13 wounded when an airstrike hit a military camp near the city of Deir Ezzor on Sunday evening, Syria’s foreign ministry said.

Four jets fired nine missiles at the camp during the attack, which destroyed three armoured vehicles, four military cars and a weapons ammunition dump.

The ministry said it had written letters of protest to the United Nations condemning what it called “flagrant aggression…which goes firmly agains the aims of the U.N. charter,” the Syrian state news agency SANA reported.

The US-backed coalition denied any involvement in the attack, saying its aircraft had not been operating in that area on Sunday.

"We've seen those Syrian reports but we did not conduct any strikes in that part of Deir Ezzor yesterday. So we see no evidence," said Colonel Steve Warren, spokesman for the coalition.

Col Warren said the nearest alliance airstrike on Sunday had hit an unmanned oil well head 34 miles southeast of the area where the Syrian troops were reportedly killed.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group, said aircraft likely to be from the anti-Isil coalition had attacked a camp in the Deir Ezzor province.

Deir Ezzor, a city in Eastern Syria, is largely under the control of Isil militants, and positions in the area have previously been targeted by both the US-led alliance and Russian aircraft.

Last week the Russian ministry of defence identified an oil field in the province of the same name as Isil’s principle source of revenue and accused Turkey of complicity in trading oil pumped from it.

An alliance attack on the Syrian army, if confirmed, would seriously increase tensions in the region and raise concerns of a proxy war between Russia and the West.

An American-led force, which Britain joined last week, has been bombing Isil positions in Syria since 2014. Russia launched its own air war in support of the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad in September.

The two sides have agreed “deconfliction” measures to prevent clashes between their separate interventions, but tensions have been heightened since Turkey shot down a Russian fighter bomber that it claimed violated its air space last month.

Since joining the conflict at the end of September, Russia is understood to have accidentally bombed positions belonging to the regime and its Hezbollah allies on several occasions.

Activists and weapons experts say Moscow’s war planes commonly rely on unguided - or dumb - bombs, which can struggle hit precise targets.