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America Is In A Proxy War With Itself In Syria
Confusion in the Obama administration’s Syria policy is playing out on the ground as U.S.-backed groups begin battling each other.
Global Research, February 24, 2016
Buzzfeed 20 February 2016
American proxies are now at war with each other in Syria.
Officials with Syrian rebel
battalions that receive covert backing from one arm of the U.S.
government told BuzzFeed News that they recently began fighting rival
rebels supported by another arm of the U.S. government.
The infighting between American
proxies is the latest setback for the Obama administration’s Syria
policy and lays bare its contradictions as violence in the country gets
worse.
The confusion is playing out on the
battlefield — with the U.S. effectively engaged in a proxy war with
itself. “It’s very strange, and I cannot understand it,” said Ahmed
Othman, the commander of the U.S.-backed rebel battalion Furqa al-Sultan
Murad, who said he had come under attack from U.S.-backed Kurdish
militants in Aleppo this week.
Furqa al-Sultan Murad receives weapons
from the U.S. and its allies as part of a covert program, overseen by
the CIA, that aids rebel groups struggling to overthrow the government
of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, according to rebel officials and
analysts tracking the conflict.
The Kurdish militants, on the other
hand, receive weapons and support from the Pentagon as part of U.S.
efforts to fight ISIS. Known as the People’s Protection Units, or YPG,
they are the centerpiece of the Obama administration’s strategy against the extremists in Syria and coordinate regularly with U.S. airstrikes.
Yet as Assad and his Russian allies have
routed rebels around Aleppo in recent weeks — rolling back Islamist
factions and moderate U.S. allies alike, as aid groups warn of a humanitarian catastrophe — the YPG has seized the opportunity to take ground from these groups, too.
In the face of public objections from
U.S. officials and reportedly backed by Russian airstrikes, the YPG has
overrun key villages in the northern provinces of Aleppo and Idlib. It
now threatens the town of Azaz, on the border with Turkey, through which
rebel groups have long received crucial supplies. Over the weekend,
Turkey began shelling YPG positions around Azaz in response, raising
another difficult scenario for the U.S. in which its proxy is under
assault from its NATO ally.
Yet as America has looked on while Russia and Syria target
its moderate rebel partners, it has failed to stop the YPG from
attacking them too. “That is a major problem,” said Andrew Tabler, a
Syria specialist at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “It’s
not just that it’s a nonsense policy. It’s that we’re losing influence
so rapidly to the Russians that people just aren’t listening to us
anymore.”
Othman, the Furqa al-Sultan Murad
commander, said the YPG tried to seize two areas of Aleppo under his
control, resulting in firefights that left casualties on both sides. He
had captured seven YPG fighters and was holding them prisoner, he added.
Othman’s group receives weapons from the
U.S. and its allies, including TOW anti-tank missiles, he said, and
fights Assad as well as ISIS. The aid is part of a long-running
CIA effort approved by Congress and coordinated from an operations room
in Turkey with participation from international allies of the rebellion
such as Saudi Arabia. Othman said he was in regular contact with his
American handlers about the problems on the ground. “The Americans must
stop [the YPG] — they must tell them you are attacking groups that we
support just like we support you,” he said. “But they are just watching.
I don’t understand U.S. politics.”
Officials with three other groups — the
Northern Division, Jaysh al-Mujahideen and a coalition called Jabhat
al-Shamiya — that have received support from the operations room also
said they were now battling the YPG in northern Syria. “There are many
groups supported by [the operations room] that are fighting the YPG
right now,” said the Northern Division’s Col. Ahmed Hamada, who added
that some of his fighters had received U.S. training in the past.
An official with the Turkish government
criticized the U.S. for what he described as a Syria policy gone awry.
“The YPG is taking land and villages from groups that are getting
American aid,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the
sensitive nature of the subject. “These are groups that are not only
getting American aid. Some of them also got training from the
Americans.”
The official added that U.S.-backed Arab
rebel groups had seen their support dwindle of late, while the YPG was
benefiting from a surge of interest from both Washington and Moscow.
“The Americans are not giving the moderate rebels enough material. They
are not providing any political support,” he said. “And they did not
stop the YPG from attacking them.”
“They said we are not in control of the
YPG in [those areas],” he added. “That’s the official answer. It doesn’t
make any sense to us. What can I say?”
In an emailed statement, Col. Patrick J.
Ryder, a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command, which oversees support
for the YPG, said he had no information to provide “regarding potential
friction between various opposition groups.”
“Syria continues to be a very complex
and challenging environment,” he said. “I can tell you that we remain
focused on supporting indigenous anti-[ISIS] ground forces in their
fight against [ISIS].”
A State Department official acknowledged
the increasingly problematic situation. “We’ve expressed to all parties
that recent provocative moves in northern Syria, which have only served
to heighten tensions and lessen the focus on [ISIS], are
counterproductive and undermine our collective, cooperative efforts in
northern Syria to degrade and defeat [ISIS],” he told BuzzFeed News,
likewise speaking on condition of anonymity.
A spokesman for the YPG declined to
comment. Yet the group appears to be battling Islamists and U.S.-backed
moderates alike, said Faysal Itani, a senior fellow at the Atlantic
Council. “The YPG has also been physically capturing territory [around]
Azaz, amid Russian bombing and regime progress further south in Aleppo
province,” he said. “I see these moves as opportunistic, capitalizing on
the insurgent losses in the province to increase YPG territory.”
The YPG is the Syrian branch of the
Kurdistan Worker’s Party, or PKK, the insurgent force warring with the
Turkish government in the country’s restive southeast. Both Washington
and Ankara list the PKK as a terror group. Yet to Turkey’s increasing
anger, the U.S. has sought to differentiate between the PKK and the YPG,
promoting the latter as a key partner. In late January, Brett McGurk,
President Obama’s special envoy to the anti-ISIS coalition, paid a visit
to the YPG in the Syrian town of Kobane, which U.S. airstrikes had
helped the group defend from ISIS last year.
The YPG fits well with the Obama
administration’s growing hesitance to confront Assad: it has long
maintained a détente with the Syrian government, focusing instead on
pushing back ISIS and other extremists from Kurdish land.
As part of its embrace of the YPG, the
Pentagon has propped up a new YPG-dominated military coalition called
the Syrian Democratic Front (SDF) and encouraged smaller Arab battalions
to join. In October, the U.S. government air-dropped a crate of weapons
to the SDF in Syria, and it has also embedded special forces advisors
with the group. This is both a bid to give U.S. support to the YPG some
political cover and a nod to the reality that driving ISIS from its
Sunni Arab strongholds will require significant help from Sunni Arab
fighters.
A Department of Defense official sought
to distance U.S. efforts from recent YPG offensives around Aleppo. He
said the U.S. was supporting the group east of the Euphrates River, in
its fight against ISIS, but not in its new campaign against rebel groups
to the west. “Some of the Kurdish groups west of the Euphrates” have
been “engaging with some Syrian opposition groups,” he said, speaking on
condition of anonymity.
“What’s important here is that we are
not providing any direct support to these groups,” he added. “Our
operations have been focused on the SDF east of the Euphrates as they
fight ISIS.”
The battle between America’s two proxies
reflects the competing impulses of the Obama administration’s Syria
policy. “The SDF model is meant to replace the failed [operations room]
model,” said Nicholas Heras, an analyst at the Center for a New American
Security.
Yet he noted that groups like Furqa
al-Sultan Murad are battling ISIS as well as Assad — and still
considered a bulwark against the extremists by the U.S. “It is a
front-line combatant against ISIS,” he said of the battalion.
The recent clashes could make it
difficult for the U.S. to build the crucial Arab component of its ISIS
fight, the Washington Institute’s Tabler said. “If this continues, the
U.S. is only going to have one option it can work with, which is the
YPG. It’s not going to have the Arab option,” he said. “Which would be
fine if the Kurds were the majority of the Syrian population, but
they’re not. We need Sunni Arabs to defeat ISIS.”
Mike Giglio is a
correspondent for BuzzFeed News based in Istanbul. He has reported on
the wars in Syria and Ukraine and unrest around the Middle East.
Contact
Mike Giglio at mike.giglio@buzzfeed.com.
The original source of this article is Buzzfeed
Copyright © Mike Giglio, Buzzfeed, 2016
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