The Obama administration is talking with Arab allies about providing ground forces to help rebels in Syria fight the Islamic State, a senior State Department official told lawmakers Wednesday.
The comment by Anne Patterson, assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, is the latest sign of how Russian military intervention has upended the nearly five-year-old conflict.
“We’ve had lots of discussions with our gulf allies and with Jordan about the possibility of introducing ground troops,” she told the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
With the Islamic State gaining ground and Russian power now backing the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad, rebel groups backed by a U.S.-led coalition are being squeezed more tightly than ever, leaving Washington scrambling for ways to shore them up.
The administration, under pressure from lawmakers to do more, announced Friday that up to 50 U.S. special operations troops would be deployed to northern Syria to advise rebel forces there and also give U.S. officials a better sense of what their capabilities are and whether they can be molded into an effective fighting force.
But President Obama still won’t bend on his refusal to take any military action against Assad, and has insisted that Russia’s intervention on his behalf will backfire, opening the door to a diplomatic solution that Secretary of State John Kerry has been seeking.
“He’s not naive about this. This is what the whole Vienna process and followup process is about,” Patterson told the panel, referring to Kerry.
Lawmakers were openly skeptical. “Given what’s happened on the ground that sounds like fantasy to me,” Democrat Gerry Connolly of Virginia said.
The administration’s refusal to confront Assad has been an irritant in its relations with Arab members of the coalition since the beginning of the bombing campaign against the Islamic State in Syria last year. It also was a factor in the failure of the administration’s program to train and equip a friendly Syrian rebel force to fight the extremists, because most recruits wanted to go after Assad instead. Administration officials redirected the $500 million authorized for the program toward direct aid to existing rebel groups.
Though a senior defense official said Friday that “a small number of allies” are interested in putting special operations forces inside Syria, Rep. Michael McCaul noted Wednesday that they were reluctant to do anything that would help Assad.
“When I talk to nations like Turkey and Jordan and the gulf states, they’re willing to put a ground force in there to defeat ISIS but they would never do so if it emboldened and empowered Assad,” the Texas Republican said. Now that the Russians are in there backing Assad it doesn’t look like he’s going anywhere anytime soon.”
