By Yoav Stern and News Agencies

Syrian state-run TV and witnesses said Sunday that American helicopters attacked an area close to the Iraqi border zone, killing at least nine people.

Local residents in a Syrian border town said that American forces killed seven men in a helicopter-borne commando attack inside Syrian territory. State-run TV later raised the number of dead to eight.

Doctors in the town of Al-Sukkariya, some eight kilometers from the Iraqi border, said seven corpses and four wounded had been delivered to a nearby clinic after the attack.

An official Syrian spokesman confirmed the attack.

The eyewitness accounts said that four helicopters were involved in the operation, with two of the helicopters landing in the town and eight American soldiers disembarking. The eyewitnesses said that the seven killed men were supposedly construction workers.

Afterwards, the U.S. helicopters left Syrian airspace with all the soldiers again on board.

There was no initial U.S. comment about the reported incident. If confirmed, it would be the first time that American forces had carried out an attack on Syrian soil.

In response, the Syrian Foreign Ministry summoned the U.S. charge d'affaires in Damascus to protest the strike, Syria's state news agency SANA reported.

Syria's deputy foreign minister had informed the U.S. official of "Syria's protest and condemnation of this serious attack", it said. The Iraqi charge d'affaires had been summoned for the same reason, the news agency reported.

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