Christoph Reuter (Der Spiegel) on Russian deaths in Syria and myths:

'Relations between the Russian mercenaries in Syria -- it is thought there are more than 2,000 of them -- and the government in Moscow have been tense for some time. The fighters claim they are being used as cannon fodder, are being kept quiet and are poorly paid. For them to now accuse the Kremlin of trying to cover up the fact that Russians were killed -- by the Americans, of all people -- hits President Vladimir Putin's government in a weak spot: its credibility.

The only verifiable sources for the decimation of hundreds of Russians are the photos and videos circulating on the internet or from Russian sources that are passed on to Western journalists. Some of them show footage from eastern Ukraine that was later doctored or even the demo version of a video game that Putin personally showed to Hollywood director Oliver Stone as alleged proof of a Russian attack on an IS convoy.

The situation on the ground between Khusham and Tabiya on the eastern bank of the Euphrates, described by a half dozen witnesses and people who were party to the events, does not confirm Russian mercenary participation in the attack or even that they joined the fighting at all. Ahmad Ramadan, the journalist who founded the Euphrates Post and has since emigrated to Turkey, comes from Tabiya. One of his contacts fights for the al-Baqir militia and took the video at the site of the bombings. "If it had been a Russian attack, with many Russian dead, we would have reported about it," he said. "But it wasn't. The Russians in Tabiya just had the bad luck of being in the wrong place at the wrong time."'

Read the article here.

The question remains what the fighters tried to achieve. Didn't they know that American Special Forces were stationed at the SFD base? Didn't they expect heavy resistance?

And as to being in the wrong place at the wrong time, one could argue that all Syrian civilians have been in the wrong place at the wrong time for the last seven years, maybe even longer.