As the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria makes gains on the battlefield despite two weeks of punishing airstrikes, potential U.S. allies are frustrated by the weak spot in President Obama’s Syria strategy — how to handle Syrian President Bashar Assad.
Many of the forces on which the success of Obama’s strategy depend see Assad, and not the Islamic State, as the principal enemy. But Washington sees him as a distraction. And that’s become a problem that the extremists have been able to exploit while diplomats negotiate competing interests.
U.S. allies in the region such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia “cannot have a situation in which Assad survives. That’s impossible,” said Tony Badran, a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Though the Turkish parliament last week authorized the deployment of troops into Syria and Iraq to fight the Islamist extremist group, leaders in Ankara say they will support only a strategy that includes removal of Assad’s regime and protection for Turkey’s borders against “other terrorist groups” — a reference to the Kurdish PKK, which has fought a guerrilla war against Ankara.
“We are ready to do everything if there is a clear strategy that after [the Islamic State], we can be sure that our border will be protected,” Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu told CNN Monday. “We don’t want the regime anymore on our border pushing people against — towards Turkey. We don’t want other terrorist organizations to be active there.”
While the Obama administration insists it isn’t cooperating with Assad’s government, many in Syria believe it is. And the administration has frustrated Turkey and rebel groups within Syria with its insistence that the Islamic State must be targeted first and with its slow response to changing the situation there.
Though Congress moved quickly to give Obama the authority to arm and train Syrian resistance fighters in Saudi Arabia, Pentagon officials say it will take more than a year for any of them to be battle-ready. Meanwhile, opposition leaders say they are not being consulted on the airstrikes — though Assad’s government has been — and openly voice their concerns that the dictator they despise is benefiting from them the most.
“With public distrust of American motives running high in Syria, we’re disempowering the very opposition we’re supposed to be helping,” Robert Ford, the former U.S. ambassador to Syria, wrote in an Oct. 3 op-ed for the New York Times.
U.S. officials also have dismissed for now Ankara’s request for a no-fly zone along its border in areas controlled by the moderate Syrian opposition. Turkish officials want the area to become a safe haven for Syrians fleeing the violence to ease the crush of refugees inside their borders, which now number 1.5 million.
Meanwhile, the Islamic State is on the verge of capturing Kobani, a strategically located town on Syria’s border with Turkey that is mostly populated by Kurds. The capture of the town would link extremist-controlled areas of northern Syria and put the group on the border of a NATO country. Many fear it would lead to another massacre.
The U.N. special envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, said Tuesday the Kurdish fighters who have held the town are on the verge of defeat and called for an international effort to save them.
“They are fighting with normal weapons, whereas the [Islamic State] has got tanks and mortars,” he said. “The world, all of us, will regret deeply if ISIS is able to take over a city which has defended itself with courage but is close to not being able to do so. We need to act now.”
Aircraft from the U.S., Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates damaged or destroyed several armored vehicles belonging to the Islamic State in strikes late Monday and early Tuesday, which the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said had helped hold off the group’s advance. But the only ground troops capable of intervening quickly enough to aid the town’s fighters remained across the border in Turkey.
Secretary of State John Kerry discussed the situation in Kobani by phone with Davutoglu on Monday and Tuesday, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said. The U.S. envoy to the coalition, retired Gen. John Allen, along with Brett McGurk, deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, were expected in Ankara on Thursday and Friday to discuss Turkey’s role.
“Turkey is determining what larger role they’ll play broadly as a part of the coalition moving forward, and that conversation is ongoing,” Psaki said. “I think they’ve indicated their openness to doing that and so there’s an active conversation about that.”
