The Clear and Present Danger Trap

By Walter Pincus

Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist Walter Pincus is a contributing senior national security columnist for The Cipher Brief. He spent forty years at The Washington Post, writing on topics that ranged from nuclear weapons to politics. He is the author of Blown to Hell: America's Deadly Betrayal of the Marshall Islanders. Pincus won an Emmy in 1981 and was the recipient of the Arthur Ross Award from the American Academy for Diplomacy in 2010.  He was also a team member for a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 and the George Polk Award in 1978.  

OPINION — When will the U.S. learn the lessons of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan? Operation Inherent Resolve has been underway since 2014, in the Iraq/Syria border areas and the operation continues with a fiscal 2022 budget of $7 billion, according to a joint report released last Tuesday by Inspectors General from the Defense and State Departments and the Agency for International Development.

That budget is to cover some 2,500 U.S. military personnel serving in Iraq; approximately 900 U.S. military personnel at several bases in Syria — many of them Special Forces; plus another nearly 8,000 Defense Department contractors of whom 2,700 are U.S. citizens, according to the report.

The goal for Operation Inherent Resolve is “to advise, assist, and enable partner forces
until they can independently defeat ISIS in designated areas of Iraq and Syria,” plus “set conditions for long-term security cooperation frameworks.”

In addition, “The broader counter-ISIS campaign includes supporting the Iraqi government and local Syrian partners with civilian-led stabilization activities.”

How many times in past years has the U.S. attempted to train partner countries to “independently” defeat their opponents or terrorists and establish “civilian-led stabilization activities?”

That U.S.-supported Operation Inherent Resolve has continued to exist for all these years — and even grow — should be a cautionary, but more publicized tale for the American people.

Eight years ago, the terrorist group Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) controlled an area of approximately 42,500 square miles in eastern Syria and western Iraq, including major cities such as Raqqa, Mosul, Ramadi and Fallujah.

In late June 2014, ISIS leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi announced the formation of a caliphate stretching from Aleppo in Syria to Diyala in Iraq.

On August 7, 2014, U.S. President Barak Obama authorized limited air strikes to defend U.S. personnel in Erbil and Baghdad from ISIS. An international coalition – including several European and Arab states, the United States, Turkey, and Iran – formed to support the Iraqi government, the Kurdish peshmerga, and Shia militias fighting against ISIS.

On October 15, 2014, the United States named the campaign Operation Inherent Resolve. Over the next year, the U.S. conducted more than 8,000 airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, and by the end of 2015, Iraqi forces had made progress in recapturing Ramadi. But in Syria, ISIS made gains near Aleppo, holding on to Raqqa and other strongholds.


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Meanwhile, in 2015, ISIS expanded its terrorist network to eight other countries. It’s supporters carried out attacks beyond the borders of its claimed caliphate. In October, ISIS’s Egypt affiliate bombed a Russian airplane, killing 224 people. On November 13, 130 people were killed and more than 300 injured in a series of coordinated attacks in Paris. And on December 2, 2015, an ISIS terrorist couple carried out an attack at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino Calif. killing 14 people. Six months later, in June 2016, a gunman who pledged support to ISIS, killed at least four dozen people at a nightclub in Orlando, Florida. 

By April 2016, the coalition had conducted more than 11,000 airstrikes, forcing ISIS to retreat from 40 percent of its territory in Iraq and 10 percent of its territory in Syria. U.S. financial and training support was given to a vetted, joint Kurdish-Arab militia called the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), primarily led by commanders from the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG). In November 2016, the U.S.-backed SDF launched an offensive with the goal of capturing the ISIS capital of Raqqa.

Backed by U.S.-led coalition airpower, Iraqi security forces retook Mosul in July 2017, and in October 2017, the SDF captured Raqqa. Both cities fell after bloody, months-long battles. In December 2017, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al Abadi declared victory over ISIS in Iraq.

By that time, the U.S. had over 2,000 military advisors and ground support troops in Iraq and Syria. President Trump’s Defense Secretary James Mattis said that the U.S. military would fight ISIS “as long as they want to fight,” with the long-term objective in Syria being to prevent their return as “ISIS 2.0.” 

In 2018, the focus of the campaign against ISIS shifted to north-eastern Syria, where – by late 2018 – the U.S.-backed SDF captured key ISIS positions putting them near the Syrian-Turkish border.

Turkey became concerned with the Kurdish-led SDF gains since some of their members were aligned with anti-Turk Kurdish elements. As a result, the U.S. found itself between two allies when a Turkish unit shelled an SDF position inside Syria. In response to the Turkish attack, the SDF suspended its offensive against ISIS and redeployed units to confront the Turkish forces.

In December 2018, the U.S. set up three observation posts along the Turkish border in northern Syria to prevent incidents between Turkish forces and the U.S.-supported, Kurdish-run SDF.

That should have signaled caution to the Pentagon and the White House.

Meanwhile, on December 19, 2018, President Trump declared ISIS defeated and signaled his intention to withdraw all 2,000 U.S. troops supporting the SDF in Syria.

However, the mass surrender of ISIS fighters and their families created a new challenge for 2019, what to do with – at that time – 800 foreign ISIS fighters being held in prisons guarded by the SDF and 4,000 of their family members held in SDF custody in Syria.

In February 2019, Trump called on European allies to take back their ISIS fighters and put them on trial, but few agreed.

The 2019 answer was to put the ISIS family members into a guarded section of the al-Hol refugee camp in northern Syria, close to the Syrian-Iraqi border. Al-Hol was originally established in 1991, for Iraqi Gulf War refugees, and reopened after the U.S. 2003 invasion of Iraq.

A new phase of Operation Inherent Resolve began: Support for prisons and refugee camps in Syria’

The IG report found, “The SDF continued to hold approximately 10,000 ISIS members in detention centers,” made up of “5,000 Syrians, 3,000 Iraqis, and 2,000 non-Iraqi,
non-Syrian fighters, which a State [Department] official said constituted the ‘single largest concentration of terrorist fighters in the world.’”

What the U.S. did not expect was that the al-Hol camp population would increase as dramatically as it did.

By September 2022, it reached 54,000 people, over half of whom are Iraqi citizens, according to last Tuesday’s IG report. According to the State Department, more than 50 percent of camp residents are children under the age of 12.

Operation Inherent Resolve forces have had to train more than 500 security personnel in the past three months for the prisons and camps, although the IG report said that while there has been improvement, it is “not adequate to disrupt all ISIS activity in the camp.”

A continuing problem is that “SDF leaders say that their highest priority is defending against Turkish attacks in northern Syria,” and according to the IG report, “the need to address Turkish activity jeopardizes their ability to execute counter-ISIS operations.”

For the U.S., the situation is more complicated because, as the IG report notes, “In response to the Turkish incursion threat, the SDF increased its military cooperation with the [Assad] Syrian regime, enabling the expansion of the regime’s military footprint in northeastern Syria.”

Beyond that, according to the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, the SDF in late July, agreed to increase oil sales to the Assad regime from wells in SDF-controlled Syrian areas.

Meanwhile, back at the al-Hol refugee camp, the U.S. State Department funds “essential services at the [refugee] camps, including maintenance of physical infrastructure, the distribution of food, water, and other assistance, and the overall coordination of humanitarian assistance and liaison with the camp administration,” according to the report.

Refugee repatriation became a policy in May 2021, but since that time, the Iraqi government has repatriated only some 754 families from al-Hol. Syrians returning home from al-Hol in the past three months were made up of just 377 individuals.

Where is Operation Inherent Resolve going?

Last January, the United Nations Security Council estimated ISIS had 6,000 to 10,000 fighters across Iraq and Syria—fewer than the 14,000 to 18,000 in January 2020.

The IGs reported, “Compared with the same period in 2021, the frequency and severity of ISIS-claimed attacks decreased dramatically in Iraq, while attacks in Syria increased significantly, marking a rebound from historically low levels the previous year.”

Last July 12, a U.S. drone strike in northwest Syria, killed a top ISIS leader, Mahir al-Agal, who worked aggressively on building the group’s networks outside of Iraq and Syria, according to American officials. “It also demonstrates that the United States does not require thousands of troops in combat missions to identify and eliminate threats to our country,” President Biden said in a statement.


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The Biden fiscal 2023 budget for Operation Inherent Resolve contains $240 million to make salary payments to tens of thousands of Iraqi and Kurdish Peshmerga soldiers who are expected to carry on the anti-ISIS fight inside Iraq.

That same budget has $71.4 million to increase the size of Syrian-based SDF forces to 19,500 from the currently supported 16,000, who serve as combat and internal security forces as well as detention facility guards.

There is also 2023 funding for a special, small Syrian military force of 160, called Maghawir al-Thawra, that carries out reconnaissance and monitoring missions in the vicinity of the Al-Tanf Garrison, the secretive U.S. military base in the southeastern Syrian desert near the Iraq and Syrian/Jordan border.

Home to some 200 U.S. Special Forces, its 34-mile, half-circle, surrounding deconfliction zone serves as a hub for coalition training and operations against ISIS as well as Iran and its proxies.

Last August, the Al-Tanf Garrison was attacked by two Iranian drones. One was shot down, the other crashed and exploded near the compound, with no injuries.

Operations will continue under a new commander who arrived in September, U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Matthew McFarlane, who will be the ninth commander to hold the job.

The 2022 Campaign Plan for Operation Inherent Resolve “outlined desired end states…and the ways and means to achieve those end states,” last week’s IG report said. However, the report added, “the end states are classified.”

Back in 1967, Senator J.W. Fulbright (D-Ark.), then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee wrote a book titled, The Arrogance of Power, in which he warned that the U.S. is “in danger of overextending itself” and alienating most of the world with its role as “international policeman.”

We are playing that international policeman role through Operation Inherent Resolve. But if the danger is clear and the U.S. didn’t take on that role, who would?

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