Taimur Khan
Foreign Correspondent
NEW YORK // During Barack Obama’s speech laying out his strategy to “destroy” ISIL, he said for the first time that he is prepared to launch airstrikes against the extremist group on its bases inside Syria, and compared the plan to the counter-terrorism campaigns – largely via drones – the US has carried out against Al Qaeda in Yemen and Somalia.
While those campaigns have succeeded in killing an endless supply of Al Qaeda leaders and prevented terrorist attacks inside the United States, they have failed to create the crucial political ground that would ultimately allow for extremist groups to be defeated.
But the US president only dedicated one short line to the need for a political solution in Syria, instead focusing on the military campaign that he intends to pursue.
Observers warn that without a concerted strategy to unite and empower the political opposition, and exploit possibly growing but quiet internal anger at the Assad regime, the counterterrorism strategy will only strengthen Damascus and fuel support for ISIL.
Strikes alone, analysts say, would make any political strategy even more difficult to implement.
“The expansion of airstrikes into Syria is precisely why there has to be a political strategy running in parallel to the military strategy against ISIS for this campaign not to result in the empowerment of the Syrian regime,” said Lina Khatib, director of the Carnegie Middle East Centre in Beirut, referring to the group by its alternate acronym.
“Assad will benefit from a weakened ISIS and if the moderate Syrian opposition is not empowered enough both militarily and politically to be able to stand up to both ISIS and Assad, then all this campaign is going to achieve is giving Assad victory on a plate.”
Syria’s western-backed National Coalition opposition was supported publicly by the US in February, when it was pushed to engage in peace talks with the Assad regime in Geneva. But the western-backed rebels were on the back foot militarily, and there was no incentive for Damascus to offer concessions.
The talks ended with no results, and since then the coalition dropped out of sight in terms of Washington’s Syria efforts.
The coalition was also riven by internal divisions that regional rivalries between the rebels’ supporters helped foment.
A political strategy that gets these regional supporters aligned as the fighting groups are strengthened is critical, Ms Khatib said.
But so far “it doesn’t look like the US has a political plan for the opposition that remains divided, especially between those abroad and within Syria”, she said, adding, “it has shown that on its own it is unfortunately not capable of achieving much”.
The political track would have to go hand in hand with creating capable and trustworthy ground forces, a task that the US has had little success with even in Iraq. Despite having tens of thousands of US troops on the ground until 2011 and spending billions of dollars to arm and train the Iraqi army, it crumbled in the face of an ISIL’s blitzkrieg in June.
The relatively moderate Syrian rebel groups that the US has supported with small amounts of arms and training have been pushed to the edge of defeat by ISIL and the Assad regime, and as a result of their weakness have been easily divided and drawn into battlefield alliances with extremist groups, making robust US support even more unlikely.
It is unclear how significantly Mr Obama’s train-and-equip plan will change the rebels’ fortunes, but if Congress does approve an accelerated military-led programme, it could put them back on the offensive and give the political opposition more leverage.
But the results of the programme are uncertain and it will take a long time before they are seen. In the meantime, dissent within the Assad regime and Syrian military may go unexploited as no clear alternative political path is being articulated by the US or its regional allies.
ISIL propaganda showing slaughter of hundreds of Syrian soldiers at the Tabqa airbase in Raqqa province “provoked considerable dissent among Alawis, whose support for the regime had previously appeared steadfast and unanimous”, Faysal Itani, a Syria analyst at the Atlantic Council think tank, wrote this week.
“Should these attitudes spread, a new opportunity will emerge for a negotiated settlement to the war between the elements of the Alawi-led armed forces and non-jihadi rebel groups.”
tkhan@thenational.ae
