Pentagon sees few options for preventing new ISIS safe haven in Syria
The United States’ abrupt withdrawal from northeastern Syria is forcing the Pentagon to accept a dangerous reality — the rebirth of an Islamic State sanctuary that could allow terrorists to launch attacks on the West.
The U.S. military won’t be able do much more than monitor and try to contain ISIS activity in parts of Syria without special operations forces on the ground, according to current and former military officials. And although the Defense Department is considering backup options including a drone campaign and occasional commando raids, the pullout of the troops who had been living in the country alongside Syrian Kurdish forces will make it difficult to track the group or find targets to attack.
For now, the U.S. may have to live with the existence of an Islamic State safe haven in Syria, just as it lives with an al-Qaida offshoot’s haven in a part of the country where the presence of Russian troops and aircraft limits the Pentagon’s reach.
“Our goal was the defeat of the Islamic State, and they’re undefeated,” said Michael Nagata, a retired lieutenant general who helped oversee the early stages of the campaign against ISIS in Syria, in an interview. “Given how dramatically the strategic situation has now changed, the [U.S.-led] coalition may now have to recalibrate. Defeat has just become a much more difficult goal.”
Nagata retired this summer after a stint overseeing strategic plans at the National Counterterrorism Center. In addition to ISIS, he said, Syria is also home to one of the largest concentrations of al-Qaida militants in the world. But that group has largely been inaccessible to the U.S. military because it resides in a part of the country where Russia and the Syrian regime, not the U.S., control the airspace. The same may soon be true of the parts of northeastern Syria where ISIS is resurging and as the United States' former Syrian Kurdish partners have invited in Syrian government troops and allied Russian forces.
That removal of U.S. special operations troops means the United States will have a more difficult time gathering intelligence on ISIS and determining its intentions, said Eric Robinson, an Army veteran who held posts at the National Counterterrorism Center and in special operations units until last year.
“There’s a direct relationship between presence on the ground and understanding the potential danger,” he said. “The unknown will be the capability and intent of the Islamic State in northeastern Syria to conduct external operations. Our ability to understand that has just been dramatically reduced.”
While a physical safe haven isn't necessary for ISIS to plan and carry out attacks outside the Middle East, it can help.
ISIS propaganda has inspired some homegrown extremists to carry out attacks on the West without assistance from operatives back in the Middle East, such as the 2016 nightclub shooting in Orlando, Fla., that killed 49 people. But at the group’s peak, ISIS commanders in Syria were also planning overseas attacks and dispatching operatives to help carry them out — including a series of bombings and shootings in 2015 in and near Paris that killed 130. A year after those attacks, a pair of U.S. strikes in Syria killed three ISIS operatives who the Pentagon said had been involved in planning the carnage.
Even ISIS' role in inspiring "lone wolf" attacks has waned as it has suffered battlefield setbacks and lost territory in Syria and Iraq, which limited its ability to churn out propaganda materials. For example, it has stopped publishing its English-language magazine.
But now, in northeastern Syria, it will have an opportunity to rebuild that capability.
A destroyed house in Baghouz, Syria. The town was a final ISIS stronghold that was taken back by the Kurdish-led Syrian Defense Forces. | Chris McGrath/Getty Images
The Pentagon’s primary strategy for preventing an ISIS resurgence has been to work “by, with and through” the Syrian Democratic Forces, consisting of Kurdish militias and smaller Arab, Assyrian and Turkmen forces. U.S. special operations troops embedded with those forces on the ground relied on their local knowledge to garner intelligence and keep most U.S. troops out of direct combat.
That approach has been upended by the withdrawal of U.S. troops and the recent Turkish attacks on Kurdish forces.
The U.S. hopes to “preserve” a relationship with the Kurdish forces even as they pivot toward Russia and the Syrian regime, a senior defense official told reporters this week, speaking on condition of anonymity like several other current and former officials quoted in this story.
But even if the relationship survives in some form, the pullout means the U.S. will have lost its direct link to its main allies in the fight against ISIS.
“By, with and through is how we do business, and my concern is that [U.S. troops’] moment-to-moment presence is what created the ability of the SDF to deal with emergent ISIS elements,” said John Allen, a retired Marine general who was previously the Obama administration’s special envoy for the coalition against ISIS.
Trump has said that a small number of U.S. troops will remain at a base in southeastern Syria, called al-Tanf, where U.S. commandos work with a partner force of Syrian Arabs.
But al-Tanf is too far from the provinces where ISIS is gaining new life to effectively support ground operations to disrupt their activities.
“The distance and the austerity and ruggedness of the terrain between al-Tanf and the remaining ISIS elements are considerable,” said Nagata. “And the reality is that life is so much simpler for ISIS in Syria now. I doubt they care about al-Tanf very much.”
The desert base is also small and austere. “You’d have to build that place up quite a bit to make it a viable counterterrorism platform,” said a current special operations officer with experience in Syria, adding that expanding al-Tanf might raise the hackles of the Syrian regime.
Another option would be to fly special operations troops into eastern Syria by helicopter from neighboring Iraq for occasional raids. The senior defense official said some of the troops leaving Syria are expected to relocate to Iraq, adding that the U.S. military’s Central Command “is still planning the details of who will be doing what where.”
The military launched a small number of such missions from Iraq into Syria in 2014 and 2015 before building its partnership with the Syrian Kurds. Military planners revisited that option after Trump previously ordered a withdrawal from Syria in December 2018, said a former senior special operations officer who has led troops in the region.
But such missions also pose stark risks. “Maybe they’ve got a miracle course of action up their sleeves," said the former senior special operations officer. “But we looked at this same problem set when the president first said he was going to pull out back in December, and there’s not a lot of good answers.”
The military "could do them, but only episodically and at very high risk. It would be occasional mowing of the grass,” Nagata added of the raid option. “When we do raids in places like ISIS-controlled territory in Syria, there’s no friendly forces anywhere nearby. There’s no friendly outpost to run to if a helicopter goes down. You are fighting your way in and you’re fighting your way out.”
Some of the risks could be lessened if the Syrian Kurds allow the U.S. to maintain occasional access to a base somewhere in the northeast that commandos could use as a jumping off-point for such raids, suggested a former senior officer who has led troops in the region. The Pentagon is looking at that option, he said — but “whether or not the Kurds will permit that is anybody’s guess. We may have burned that bridge.”
Or the U.S. could rely on air strikes from drones and manned aircraft — if it can maintain access to the skies over northeastern Syria. Another senior defense official told reporters that U.S. surveillance aircraft will continue to fly over the area for the time being to monitor activity at prisons where Kurdish forces are guarding captured ISIS militants.
In some countries with al-Qaida and ISIS branches, such as Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan, the U.S. military has relied heavily on air strikes. But in most cases, as in Yemen and Somalia, local proxy forces have complemented the strikes with operations on the ground. And in all of those cases, the U.S. has been able to count on “permissive” skies that the host government has allowed its drones to operate in.
That may not be the case in Syria. The U.S. and Russia have long flown on opposite sides of a “de-confliction line” in Syria. Russian planes have been operating mostly in the west of the country supporting the Syrian government forces in the country's civil war, while U.S. aircraft operated in the east against ISIS targets.
But the willingness of Russia and the Syrian regime to allow the U.S. its own air sector was predicated on the Pentagon’s need to defend its forces on the ground, said Nagata. And with those forces now mostly gone, Russian and regime aircraft may soon move into those areas.
“It’s going to be much more difficult to do kinetic strikes,” said Nagata, using the military’s jargon for air attacks. “If you’re Syria, Turkey, Russia, the officials we’ll have to coordinate airspace with, it’s rational for them to be thinking, ‘I’m less interested now in allowing the Americans to coordinate.'”
Having to fly alongside Russian, Turkish or Syrian aircraft would complicate U.S. drones' ability to carry out strikes, said Wes Bryant, a former Air Force special operations targeting specialist who has coordinated strikes against ISIS. “Anything between the drone and the target on the ground needs to be cleared out of the airspace,” Bryant said. “Now we’re going to have to coordinate multi-nationally. We’d probably get very few strikes off.”
And U.S. drone campaigns, Nagata said, have only been able to keep a lid on terrorist factions, not defeat them. “What we’ve learned over the past 18 years is that we’re very good at identifying and striking targets, but our ability to prevent them from regenerating is very weak,” he said.
The “enduring defeat of ISIS” remains the Pentagon’s goal in Syria, the first senior defense official insisted this week. But in reality, the U.S. may have to be content with the ability to disrupt the group’s activities.
“It would be a humiliation for the U.S. or any country to now say they’re interested in a goal less than defeating ISIS or al-Qaida. That would be politically untenable,” Nagata said. “But the harsh reality is that both goals are now much farther away than they were a few weeks ago.”
