The Obama administration’s decision to target the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) but not the regime of Syrian President Bashar al Assad was a “half-measure” that has led to the “latest U.S. failure in Syria,” a staff editorial appearing Wednesday in The Washington Post argued.
The latest U.S. failure in Syria is particularly striking because, as Mr. Obama emphasized in an appearance Monday at the Pentagon, the foundation of his policy in Iraq and Syria is to train local forces that the United States can support. The president conceded that “this aspect of our strategy was moving too slowly”; in fact, it has failed in both countries. According to Mr. Carter, the 3,500 U.S. personnel deployed in Iraq since last year had trained just 8,800 Iraqi army and Kurdish militia soldiers. Just 1,300 Sunni tribesmen have been recruited, though Mr. Carter said such Sunni forces were essential to retaking cities captured by the Islamic State.
Administration officials have a penchant for blaming Iraqi and Syrian Sunnis for lacking the “will” to fight, without considering why that might be. A couple of the principal reasons are the product of Mr. Obama’s policies. Sunni leaders don’t trust the United States to defend them against the Iranian-backed Shiite militias that operate in concert with the Iraqi government. They wonder why the White House still refuses to deploy Special Operations forces advisers or tactical air controllers to the front lines with Iraqi units, even though, as Gen. Dempsey testified, that “would make them more capable.”
Syrian Sunni fighters want to join a force that will take on the Assad regime as well as the Islamic State, but the Obama administration won’t even commit to defending the fighters it is training if they are subjected to the regime’s signature “barrel bomb” attacks. “That decision will be faced when we introduce fighters into the field,” Mr. Carter told the Senate panel. Unless Mr. Obama is prepared to make a more decisive commitment to training and defending U.S.-allied forces, there won’t be many of them.
Implicit in this critique is an observation made recently by Tony Badran, a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, that the Obama administration had acquiesced to an “Iranian zone of influence in Syria.” Jonathan Spyer, director of of the Rubin Center, made similar observations about the administration’s acquiescence to the role played by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in training and equipping the Shiite militias in Iraq.
Michael Pregent observed in On This Battlefield, the U.S. and Iran Work Hand in Hand, which was published in the April 2015 issue of The Tower Magazine, that siding with Iran didn’t just discourage moderate Sunnis from fighting with the U.S. against ISIS, but also drove them to fight for ISIS.
ISIS is having unexpected success due to the relationships we are forging in this fight. The U.S. is now inadvertently enabling Iran’s marginalization of both Shia and Sunni nationalists. As a result, Sunnis will turn to armed resistance, not because they support ISIS, but because they will see it as a defense of Sunni territory against a Shia threat led by Iran and supported by the U.S.
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