After a year of, in his own words, a “shellacking” on the foreign policy front, President Barack Obama appears to have regained his footing in international affairs. He has been able to sign a new groundbreaking climate change agreement with China and move to end America’s estrangement from Cuba. Negotiations with Iran to halt its nuclear weapons program are progressing. The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, which seemed to be on the verge of overturning the Levantine and Mesopotamian branches of the Arab state system six months ago, appears to have been checked in most of its offensives against the Iraqi government.
However, it is in this last struggle against ISIS that American policy still remains faulty and incomplete. While its advances have been mostly halted in Iraq, ISIS remains firmly in control of a large area of Syria. The United States has launched airstrikes against the group’s Syrian strongholds as well, but this strategy is only a half measure. The airstrikes in Syria have, with the exception of their impact on battles in the northern town of Kobani, been unable to shake ISIS’s hold on eastern Syria. In fact they have caused some rebel groups to defect to the ISIS banner or that of other extremist groups like Al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate. The current strategy will, at best, simply hit ISIS forces in Syria without breaking their hold on the areas they control, and, at worst, gut the remaining non-extremist Syrian opposition and leave ISIS and other extremists even stronger than before.
The Syrian Situation
The grinding civil war in Syria will enter its fourth year in March 2015. The fighting has killed over 200,000 Syrians, including both combatants and civilians, and displaced almost half of the prewar Syrian population. On one side stands the defiant remnants of the Syrian Arab Republic under President Bashar al-Assad, which dominates an area stretching from the capital, Damascus, along the Lebanese border, and into parts of Aleppo and the province of Idlib in the north. Facing the regime are the forces of ISIS, who control the eastern third of the country, and a collection of rebel groups ranging from the U.S.-backed Harakat Hazam and the Syrian Revolutionaries Front to Islamist groups such as Ahrar al-Sham and the local al-Qaeda affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra.
The United States, which had previously worked to stay as far as possible from the Syrian cauldron of destruction, finally took an active military role after ISIS began its rampage across Iraq. American aircraft attacked ISIS forces primarily near the town of Kobani on the Turkish border and against the ISIS home base in Raqqa. The United States has also announced its intention to train 5,000 Syrian fighters to counter ISIS in Syria, although that training has yet to begin. All of these measures were outlined by President Obama in his speech on September 10, when he stated “we must strengthen the opposition as the best counterweight to extremists like [ISIS], while pursuing the political solution necessary to solve Syria’s crisis once and for all.”
Hollow Promises
Despite this lofty rhetoric, major problems have appeared in the president’s strategy for dealing with ISIS in Syria. Current strategy does not acknowledge that ISIS’s presence in Syria is a symptom of a much deeper problem: the alienation of a large number of the Syrian population by the brutality and inhumanity of the government of Bashar al-Assad. The majority of civilians killed in the civil war have been killed not by ISIS or other rebels, but through indiscriminate shelling and bombing by the Syrian regime. The regime has also engaged in brutal torture and imprisonment of any remaining dissidents in the areas that it controls. And despite the much trumpeted agreement by the Syrian government to give up its chemical weapon stockpiles after the aborted American intervention against the regime in August 2013, Syrian government forces did not surrender the entirety of their stores. In fact they have continued to use chemical weapons against civilians and rebel fighters.
For a large number of Syrians, both civilians and members of the armed opposition, the naked brutality and cruelty of the Syrian government has destroyed any legitimacy it may have had at the start of the conflict. As a result, the mainstream opposition views the regime, rather than ISIS, as the primary enemy, creating a major disconnect between the goals of the United States and the rebels it is ostensibly helping. A sign of the poor coordination between American and Syrian opposition priorities has been the failure of the United States and its coalition partners to communicate their airstrikes against ISIS with Syrian rebels on the ground, making it impossible for the opposition forces to fully take advantage of the bombings against ISIS.
The larger problem for U.S. policy, however, is the steady erosion of American credibility as a result of its focus on ISIS without any corresponding action against the Assad government. As American forces have stepped up their actions against ISIS, Syrian regime forces have shifted resources to pressing other, more moderate rebel groups. This has included a major regime offensive against rebel strongholds in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, as well as a drastic escalation in their air strikes against rebels and civilians alike. The Syrian government has also publically disclosed that is being informed of the American airstrikes in advance. All of these factors have given the Syrian people the image of an American campaign that is focused on narrow American interests while leaving them at the mercy of a cruel dictatorship in Damascus. This perception is steadily weakening the esteem many Syrians held for the United States and has led many to shift allegiances to ISIS because of the group’s success in fighting regime forces.
Furthermore, the United States has chosen not to solely focus its airstrikes against ISIS, also targeting Al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra. This expansion of airstrikes has directly caused a weakening of more moderate Syrian groups. Despite being a branch of Al-Qaeda’s global organization, Jabhat al-Nusra has also proven itself as one of the most effective and powerful rebel groups fighting against the Assad government. Therefore, American strikes against it are viewed not as a continuation of the American fight against ISIS, but as the United States supporting the Assad government’s efforts against the Syrian opposition. In Idlib province, American airstrikes against the Al-Nusra Front helped tip the fragile balance between the Al-Qaeda affiliate and U.S.-backed forces. The bombings against Al-Nusra gave many civilians and fighters in the province the feeling that the United States was doing the work of the Assad government, causing them to turn against the groups who received American support. In short, this loss of support has allowed Jabhat al-Nusra to sweep through Idlib province, evicting the remains of the U.S.-backed forces and seizing their headquarters and weapons caches. The appearance of an unspoken alliance between the United States and the Assad government and the former’s campaign against ISIS have driven many antigovernment activists and fighters to join the ranks of either ISIS or Jabhat al-Nusra. Without a change in strategy, the United States will soon find itself without suitable partners in Syria and facing an even stronger and energized ISIS.
A New Direction
In order to halt the further radicalization of the Syrian opposition, the United States needs to create distance between itself and the Assad government. It also needs to recommit itself to diplomatically seeking a political solution to the war in Syria and facilitating a transition to a national unity government.
To accomplish the first task, the United States can curtail the Syrian government’s use of air power by expressly demanding that the Assad government halt its use of its air force in attacks against the opposition. If the government refuses to accept this demand, the American military should expand its air campaign in Syria to create a no fly zone that prevents the Assad government from using its air capabilities against Syrian rebels and civilians. The Syrian Arab Air Force is the primary advantage the regime possesses over its rebel opponents. It carries out bombing attacks on civilians and rebel-held zones to prevent consolidation of opposition forces and support regime ground campaigns. However, it is used exclusively in an air-to-ground fashion, hitting land-based targets as opposed to engaging other aircraft. It has been able to operate with impunity thanks to the lack of opposition air forces deployed against it. Neither the Air Force nor the extensive Syrian air defense system have been able to defend against Israeli airstrikes targeting weapons shipments to Hezbollah since the civil war began. Furthermore, the SAAF’s constant use in combat to fly sorties against rebel positions has greatly degraded, through overuse and enemy fire, the equipment and trained personnel of the force. This has further weakened any air-to-air combat capabilities they originally possessed.
All of these factors suggest that it will not require a drastic increase in American commitment to create and enforce no fly zones in rebel-held parts of Syria. Moreover, the regime would very likely be averse to militarily challenging the declaration of the zones, as it would almost certainly result in the destruction of the valuable and rapidly dwindling aircraft it possess. Halting the bombing by the Assad government will be a major boon for the United States’ credibility with the Syrian opposition and will be crucial in allowing the rebels to recover from the regime’s unrelenting aerial assault.
Coupled with this military initiative to blunt the regime’s striking power against civilians and rebel forces, the United States needs to recommit itself to vigorously pursuing a diplomatic solution to the war in Syria. Assad’s main backers, Iran and Russia, have recently been making signals that they want to see an end to the Syrian Civil War. They have proposed a new peace deal to be the basis of negotiations on the end of the conflict. Russia is facing a collapsing economy and continued fighting in Ukraine, while Iran is forced to send support to its proxies fighting in Iraq against ISIS and is also dealing with the budgetary fallout from tanking international oil prices. With these pressures, neither nation has the same ability to continue support for the Assad government as they did at the start of the war. Furthermore, Iran’s actions in Iraq, where it was instrumental in removing Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, as well as statements by members of the Iranian political elite, suggest that Iran would be willing to negotiate President Assad’s departure from Syria.
The United States cannot afford to waste this potential opening. Both the combatants on the ground and their respective international backers are exhausted by the continued slaughter that has been tearing Syria apart since 2011. The potential for a diplomatic compromise ending the war exists now more than ever before.
Furthermore, despite the dominant role of Islamist groups such as ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra in the Syrian opposition, there are still secular opposition groups who seek a democratic Syria. The forces of the Southern Front in Syria, for example, represent a moderate and secular force that could help serve as a diplomatic partner on the opposition side of the conflict. Thus, the United States currently has allies both on the ground and in the political opposition outside Syria to coordinate a diplomatic offensive to bring about an end to the fighting.
It is imperative that the United States change course in Syria. The current policy is not only failing to significantly weaken ISIS, but actually may strengthen it in the long run. It is also likely to extend the bloodletting in Syria and further radicalize the conflict, diminishing the possibility of a diplomatic settlement and pushing the region towards a state of perpetual war for the foreseeable future. Vigorous American action now, which recognizes the role that President Assad and his thugocracy in Damascus have played in radicalizing the opposition and perpetuating ISIS, could help reinvigorate the Syrian opposition and galvanize it to resist ISIS, while also helping generate a new international push for a diplomatic resolution in a war-torn nation. Hopefully, President Obama, no longer on the ballot and with only two years remaining in office, and thus liberated from the political and electoral constraints that have hampered his Syrian policy in the past, will embrace a more active American role against the Assad government and make 2015 the last year of Syria’s bloody civil war.
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