This comes less than 3 weeks after a similar incident and just days after the US shot down a Syrian fighter jet. That is where USA forces have been training and advising local Syrian Arabs for the fight against Islamic State militants.
The U.S. -led coalition said in a statement that an F-15E Strike Eagle jet destroyed the Shaheed-129 drone around 12:30 am northeast of the Al-Tanaf garrison, which is close to the Jordanian border. This month, an American warplane almost shot down a Syrian SU-22 that appeared to be maneuvering to drop bombs on American-backed Syrian fighters, but the Syrian aircraft dumped its munitions in the desert and zoomed away.
Russian Federation condemned the USA action and in retaliation suspended a hotline meant to prevent such incidents.
The U.S. has also fired on Syrian government ground forces in the east on two occasions in just the last month.
While both the USA and Russia say their forces are in Syria to fight ISIS, Russia has allied itself with the regime of Syrian President Bahsar al-Assad while the US-led coalition has aligned with groups that oppose both the Assad regime and ISIS.
In a separate incident, Iran's Revolutionary Guards said they had launched several missiles from Iran into eastern Syria on Sunday, targeting IS fighters.
A statement by the army of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said the USA "atack was an attempt to undermine efforts of the army as the only effective force capable with its allies ... in fighting terrorism across its territory..."
Russia disputed claims that its aircraft was at fault during the encounter and said it intercepted two USA reconnaissance aircraft as they "approached the Russian state border".
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Syria's primary interest is to hold a corridor from Iraq's border to Damascus, giving a route to Iraqi Shi'ite militias into the country to join the ISIS war. USA warplanes launched three other airstrikes against the forces there. Pentagon said it was a provocative maneuver.
Asked Tuesday whether the hotline was no longer being used, a Pentagon spokesman, Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, said he could not discuss the matter beyond saying the US stands ready to use the line.
The incident occurred Monday morning as an RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft flew in global airspace above the Baltic Sea.
US -backed forces recently pushed into Raqqa, the northern Syrian city that served as the group's de facto capital. One of the officials said that UAV "was assessed as a threat".
On Sunday, Iran's Revolutionary Guards said they had fired mid-range ground-to-ground missiles from a site in western Iran targeting "the headquarters and meeting place and suicide vehicle assembly line" of "IS terrorists" in Deir al-Zour province.
The Syrian government forces' march toward the Jordanian border comes two weeks after they reached the border with Iraq for the first time in years.
"As a precautionary measure, Australian Defence Force (ADF) strike operations into Syria have temporarily ceased", a defence spokeswoman said in a statement.
It later emerged that Russian Federation and the United States continued to use the hotline even after Moscow said it was hanging up.
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