2008 Abu Kamal raid

2008 Abu Kamal raid
Part of Iraq War
Sukkariyeh Location of Sukkariyeh in Syria
Type	Helicopter raid
Location	Sukkariyeh, Syria 34°30′0″N 40°53′0″E / 34.50000°N 40.88333°E / 34.50000; 40.88333Coordinates: 34°30′0″N 40°53′0″E / 34.50000°N 40.88333°E / 34.50000; 40.88333
Target	Abu Ghadiya  †, Senior Coordinator of al-Qaeda in Iraq in Syria
Date	October 26, 2008 (2008-10-26) 13:45 GMT (16:45 local time )
Executed by	U.S. helicopter-borne United States Special Operations Forces
Casualties	8 killed 7 injured

The 2008 Abu Kamal raid was an attack carried out by helicopter-borne CIA paramilitary officers from Special Activities Division and United States Special Operations Command, Joint Special Operations Command inside Syrian territory on October 26, 2008. The Syrian government called the event a "criminal and terrorist" attack on its sovereignty, alleging all of the reported eight fatalities were civilians. An unnamed U.S. military source, however, alleges that the target was a network of foreign fighters who travel through Syria to join the Iraqi insurgency against the United States-led Coalition in Iraq and the Iraqi government.

Throughout the Iraq War, Syria had reportedly served as a conduit for foreign fighters intending to enter Iraq to fight US, coalition, or Iraqi military and police forces. US officials had complained that militants and their reinforcement and logistics networks have been able to operate openly in Syria, and that the Syrian government had not made sufficient effort to stop it. The US said that militants flew into Damascus and then, with the help of emplaced networks, travelled across the Syrian border into Iraq, mainly through the city of Ramadi. According to the US military, the foreign militants were responsible for 80% to 90% of the suicide attacks in Iraq, mainly targeting Iraqi civilians.

In the summer of 2007, a US military raid on a suspected al-Qaeda in Iraq house in the Iraqi town of Sinjar, near Syria, yielded documents containing information about alleged Syrian smuggling networks used to move foreign fighters into Iraq. The documents included al-Qaeda in Iraq records of more than 500 foreign fighters who had entered from Syria, according to the Combating Terrorism Center at the US Military Academy, where civilian analysts examined the documents. A July 2008 report on what the documents contained indicated that at least 95 Syrian "coordinators" were involved in facilitating the movement of the foreign fighters into Iraq. The report stated that many of the coordinators were from smuggling families in Bedouin clans and other Syrian tribes.