By Zachary Cohen, CNN
(CNN) — When an attacker killed two US service members and a civilian interpreter in Syria over the weekend, President Donald Trump vowed “very serious” retribution against those responsible, and officials were quick to describe the assailant as a “lone gunman” who was a member of ISIS.
However, a spokesman for Syria’s Ministry of Interior Affairs acknowledged Saturday that the attacker had been part of the country’s Internal Security service. Trump, as well as Syrian leaders, were quick to distance the gunman from the country’s fledgling government that has received strong American support in recent months.
Days later, ISIS has not claimed responsibility for the attack and multiple sources familiar with the investigation, including US and Syrian officials, tell CNN that the shooter’s ties to the terror group are less clear-cut than both governments have publicly claimed.
But the attack demonstrates how the new regime in Syria continues to grapple with extremist elements within the country, including among members of its own army, the sources said. It’s also an echo of the so-called green-on-blue attacks that US forces suffered in Afghanistan – where troops worked alongside local forces but took casualties as that nation attempted to forge a new military.
Initial indications suggested the shooter had affiliations with the Syrian security forces at some point, according to a US official. Whether those affiliations were in the past or present remains unclear, but efforts are underway to better understand the individual’s background and the circumstances of the attack itself.
Hundreds of American troops remain in Syria as part of an ongoing mission to root out ISIS. The slain soldiers, Sgt. Edgar Brian Torres Tovar, 25, of Des Moines, Iowa, and Sgt. William Nathaniel Howard, 29, of Marshalltown, Iowa, were deployed as part of a rotation of the Iowa National Guard.
Trump will be meeting with the families of the two killed soldiers on Wednesday at Dover Air Force Base as they receive the remains of the service members, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday.
The mission that those soldiers were performing has brought the Trump administration together with the new Syrian regime, which took control of the country after toppling Bashar al-Assad’s government last year.
US officials have heavily invested in supporting Syria’s new president, Ahmed al-Sharaa who previously led a US-designated terrorist group and until recently had a $10 million US bounty on his head but who has attempted to transition what had been a hodgepodge resistance force into a governing authority in the country.
“The [Syrian] army is comprised of fighters from the Revolution and includes folks of all background, some with extremist ties,” one former US official who recently traveled to Damascus and met with senior Syrian officials said. “They are trying to transition but as the attack the other day highlighted there are still extremist elements within the country.”
US and Syrian officials have privately echoed that sentiment, noting that Syria’s forces are currently made up of an array of fighters from different backgrounds and with varying extremist views and affiliations.
The Ministry of Interior Affairs spokesman, Nour Eddin al-Baba, told Syrian state television that the attacker had been flagged for a security review and that Syrian officials had alerted the US-led international coalition against ISIS in Syria about preliminary information “indicating a possible breach or expected ISIS attacks.”
“However, (coalition) forces did not take the Syrian warnings into account,” al-Baba added.
Yet the source with knowledge of the current US-Syrian cooperation efforts questioned how mu