The US thought they’d killed an ‘Isis spy’. He may have been an ally

A A Syrian tribal leader who was shot dead during a joint US-Syrian special forces raid after intelligence reports suggested he was an Islamic State spy may have been a respected intelligence operative working for the Syrian government against ISIS terrorist cells.

Khaled al-Masoud al-Badri, 36, was wounded twice at his home in al-Dumair, northeast of Damascus, during a pre-dawn raid last Saturday. The Americans were so confident they had killed ISIS's intelligence chief that Tom Barrack, the envoy to Syria and Lebanon, celebrated with a message on X saying: “Syria is on our side again.”

However, it is likely that Badri, whose death sparked fury among Bedouin tribes in the central Badiya region of Syria, was acting against Islamic State for the intelligence wing of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the Islamist rebel group that led the offensive that toppled Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in December 2024.

At Badri's wake in Al-Dumair on Wednesday, Mohammed Abdul Aziz al-Masoud, 31, said: “My brother was not a terrorist. Quite the opposite. Khaled worked in HTS's intelligence unit since 2018, specifically to spy on Daesh.” [Isis]. He was killed because his enemies gave the Americans false information about him.

“There is enormous bitterness among us. Khaled was one of our proudest revolutionaries in the fight against the Assad regime. He was the leader of our tribe, maintaining a direct link between our people and the government. Such is the tension now that there is talk among the Bedouin about expelling the Americans and attacking their patrols.”

Barak's tweet was not removed from X, and neither the US-led coalition nor Syrian government publicly commented on Badri's death. But the behavior of American and Syrian officials suggests they realized they may have killed an ally.

After the raid, Badri was flown by a US helicopter to a hospital in Hasakah in northeastern Syria and died there from his injuries. When Sabar Mohammed al-Sheikh al-Kelani, his mother and her family were called to collect his body, they were met by Abu Jabar al-Shami, a senior HTS officer who they said apologized for killing Badri.

Government security forces attended Badri's funeral on Monday, and officials attended his wake two days later.

Badri's death comes at a difficult time for Ahmed al-Shar, the new Syrian president, who is trying to juggle the interests of his own revolutionary power base with those of his new Western allies.

As a former commander of HTS, Shara consolidated his power in the northern province of Idlib during the Syrian civil war, defeating other militant groups and the Western-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA), and fighting against ISIS.

After HTS led the overthrow of Assad, the group was nominally dissolved and became part of state institutions, although HTS's core command remains the dominant force in Syria.

Since then, Western powers have courted Shara to join the American-led coalition against ISIS. The US withdrew its designation of HTS as a foreign terrorist organization in July, and the UK followed suit this week. In 2017, the UK banned HTS as a terrorist group due to its links to al-Qaeda.

About 2,000 US troops are in Syria conducting operations against ISIS, along with a small contingent of British special forces. However, these American units are located alongside Syrian troops outside of Shara's—for now—direct control.

Most US troops are either in the northeast of the country, in areas controlled by the Kurdish SDF, or at the Tanf base in the southeast, where they are working with the legacy FSA unit.

This month, the FSA was renamed the Badia Special Forces and technically placed under the Interior Ministry. However, in practice they remain a coalition asset.

Operations against ISIS often lack close coordination between these US-backed Syrian units and Damascus-controlled security forces, leading to a murky intelligence picture in which Badri was killed. Badri appears to have been shot by Syrian commandos belonging to the FSA unit based in Tanf, and not as part of a joint operation between American special forces and Damascus units, as Barrack on X suggested.

Witnesses to the raid said a convoy of American soldiers in Humvees led FSA special forces in pickup trucks to Badri's home, where FSA troops tried to burst through his front door. Badri shouted that he was a government intelligence officer, but he was shot in the upper abdomen and leg by an FSA commando who had climbed onto the roof.

Much of the anger has focused on the budding relationship between Damascus and Washington, as well as the larger issue of identifying common friends and common enemies.

Sami Khaled al-Masud said: “The FSA in Tanf is a group of thugs and mercenaries who do the Americans' dirty work and kill people for $400 a month. The Americans pay them money to send false intelligence reports and kill people. There is a fear among many of our veteran rebels that our voices no longer mean anything, that we are being sold out to the Americans as part of a new agenda day.”