Two weeks of almost daily airstrikes against Syrian bases of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria have had an impact.
The U.S.-led strikes have disrupted the Islamist extremist group’s ability to make money from selling oil, interfered with command and control, and forced its fighters to be more careful when moving around.
But the success of the strikes, which Pentagon officials describe as “strategic” in their aims, have exposed a weak spot in U.S. plans for Syria: What comes next?
The Obama administration’s plan to arm and train moderate Syrian rebels is under way, but it will take at least a year for the first 5,000 of a planned 12,000 to 15,000 fighters to begin making an impact on the battlefield. Meanwhile, many Syrians remain skeptical of the aims of the U.S.-led coalition, and experts suggest the airstrikes may backfire unless their concerns are addressed.
“As the airstrikes drag on without any direct benefits for the local communities, the change in attitude towards a more cynical view of the international role will make a future political settlement in Syria much harder to achieve,” Delma Institute analyst Hassan Hassan wrote in an Oct. 1 op-ed in the National, a daily newspaper published in Abu Dhabi.
In interviews with Western reporters, leaders of the rebel movements on which the administration’s strategy depends have expressed concerns about the airstrikes and even outright opposition to them.
Among the concerns are that the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad appears to be the biggest beneficiary of the strikes, even though the United States is on record as saying he must go and U.S. officials insist they will not coordinate anti-Islamic State efforts with his government. Rebel leaders have said Assad remains their top target and want the air campaign extended to his forces.
“The Syrian opposition views Assad and ISIS as two sides of the same coin. Hitting ISIS weakens Assad, and hitting Assad will be necessary to strengthen the Free Syrian Army’s ability to help defeat ISIS,” Oubai Shahbandar, a Washington-based spokesman for the Syrian Opposition Coalition, told the Washington Examiner.
“The FSA is the only force in Syria that has successfully fought ISIS,” he said. “That’s why it is critical for the anti-ISIS coalition to help strengthen the FSA and coordinate airstrikes as the military campaign moves forward.”
A U.S. decision to target the Khorasan Group, an al Qaeda offshoot, in the first strikes also caused problems. Officials said Khorasan’s bases near Aleppo were hit Sept. 22 because the group was in the final stages of planning an attack on the United States or another Western target. But the group’s host in Syria, the al Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra Front, is seen by many Syrians as a legitimate part of the resistance to Assad, and other resistance factions sometimes work with al-Nusra.
Al-Nusra Front leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, in a Sept. 28 speech, denounced the airstrikes and predicted they would lead to eruption of a “volcano” of opposition across the region against the United States and its allies. He also warned other rebel groups not to let their hostility against the Islamic State push them toward the West.
One coalition strike against a base used by al-Nusra nearly hit an FSA command post because the two were only about 200 yards apart, FSA leaders told the Daily Beast.
“Because there is no coordination, they are hitting empty buildings for ISIS,” Hussam Al Marie, spokesman for the FSA in northern Syria, told the Daily Beast, noting that coalition forces didn’t know the extremists weren’t at the target site. “We have been getting promises that the coordination will be coming, but we have been getting promises since the beginning of this revolution and nothing has happened yet.”
President Obama’s credibility also is a factor in the Syrian conflict. In an Aug. 8 interview with Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, Obama disparaged the effectiveness of Syrian rebels, saying, “It’s always been a fantasy — this idea that we could provide some light arms or even more sophisticated arms to what was essentially an opposition made up of former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth, and that they were going to be able to battle not only a well-armed state, but also a well-armed state backed by Russia, backed by Iran, a battle-hardened Hezbollah. That was never in the cards.
“There’s not as much capacity as you would hope.”
That was only a month before he made arming and training those same rebels one of the cornerstones of his anti-ISIS strategy.
But the biggest concern is the possibility that Western efforts to build a moderate political and military force that can replace Assad are too little, too late. U.S. officials have said the airstrikes are the beginning effort toward that goal, but the administration’s strategy depends heavily on whether those moderate rebels can be found and strengthened in time.
“It’s incredible that you have still so many moderates in Syria after the hell they’ve been living through the past three years with all the world looking and doing nothing,” said Jean-Pierre Filiu, a veteran French diplomat and Middle East scholar who visited Aleppo in 2013.
Filiu says a victory against ISIS in Syria is more achievable than a victory in Iraq, because resistance forces there have done a better job of containing the Islamist extremist group than the Iraqi army has managed to do, but “the clock is ticking.”
