U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is defending President Trump’s decision to withdraw support for Kurdish troops in Northeast Syria, saying Turkey has a “legitimate security concern’.
Meanwhile, other countries, along with both Republican and Democrat members of Congress in the U.S., are condemning the move calling it a betrayal of the Kurdish troops who fought alongside the U.S. against ISIS in the region. U.S. officials are also concerned that the decision will deeply destabilize efforts to contain ISIS and will allow the terrorist group the freedom to reconstitute.
The Cipher Brief spoke with Dr. Kimberly Kagan, founder and President of the Institute for the Study of War, two days before the White House made the announcement that the U.S. would pull troops from the northeastern part of the country. President Trump’s decision to do so followed a phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and cleared the way for the military offensive.
The Cipher Brief: What is the real threat from ISIS in Syria today?
Kagan: The ISW analysts looking at Syria are assessing that, first and foremost, ISIS is not defeated, in Syria or in its neighbor, Iraq. We are observing a resurgence of ISIS a reconstitution of its command and control structures, it's logistics, nodes and the places where it attacks. ISIS is securing its finances and its infrastructure in a way that signals to us that they are preparing for a new phase of a campaign.
The Cipher Brief: What would a campaign like that look like? Will they set out to regain territory again, or would it be different now?
Kagan: ISIS leader, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, called on September 16th for the detainees who are in the prisons in Iraq and Syria, to actually to break out of those prisons. Let me talk to you a little bit about and why I think it's so significant, and how it will guide the campaign.
When ISIS came out of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, back in 2013, it did so by launching a campaign to break itself out of the prisons, the detention facilities, in which it was held inside of Iraq. The ISIS leadership that was outside of these prisons coordinated with the ISIS members who were inside of these prisons and launched spectacular attacks, including multiple suicide vehicle born IEDs against these prisoners in a coordinated way in order to replenish the ISIS fighting force from within those detention facilities.
ISIS called this campaign ‘Breaking The Walls’, and the idea was to break down the walls of the prison and free the members who were in detention so that they could be part of the ISIS fighting force.
Indeed, ISIS succeeded at breaking its members out of some very important prison facilities in the fall of 2013. It took ISIS only five months after that to be ready to take over the city of Fallujah. And in less than a year, ISIS had taken over the city of Mosul with the catastrophic effects that we all know of now in retrospect.
ISIS had designed a campaign before to break its fighters out of prisons, and ISIS is now designing a campaign again to break its fighters out of prisons. The first play that it is likely to have, is a play that it's run before.
Does that mean that ISIS actually wants to take territory back? Yes, I do think that ISIS means to take territory either to govern or to develop for itself freedom of movement and safe haven in order to reconstitute its forces and reconstitute its Caliphate.
But that's not necessarily it's immediate objective. What it means to do first is regain access to its followers in order to be able to move ahead.
The Cipher Brief: How dangerous is this?
Kagan: It's incredibly dangerous. The detention facilities that we we're talking about when we say the U.S. Partner Forces are the Syrian Democratic Forces, who are predominantly Kurd, and they are the force that actually commands and controls around these detention facilities. They're the ones who have responsibility for the detainees and their welfare. The humanitarian conditions in these prisons or detention centers are terrible, and the population in these detention facilities exceeds the capacity of these facilities to hold it.
They are at two to three times capacity. They are under-guarded, and that makes them vulnerable to what ISIS is trying to do. Let me flag that the DOD Inspector General report on Syria, which came out over the summer, noted that the lead military command in the area was concerned about the radicalization of people inside these detention facilities. And the report noted that these facilities have only perimeter defenses, which means that they're only guarded from the outside. So, we are looking at an extremely high-risk situation. In a certain sense, right now the capital of the Caliphate, exists. It exists in this detention facility in the territory held by the Syrian Kurds, inside of Syria, where we have almost 70,000 people detained or in a neighboring refugee camp, a IDP camp for internally displaced persons who came out of the last pocket that ISIS held. That's a bigger municipality than I grew up in.
The Cipher Brief: What should the U.S. do next?
Kagan: The United States must keep its forces in Syria because U.S. forces are the glue that holds a big area of Northeast Syria together. The United States does not have forces in Northeast Syria alone. It is accompanied by allies from our global coalition, and it's accompanied by partners such as the Syrian Democratic Forces, the predominantly Kurdish and partly Arab forces that our U.S. Forces have trained, advised, and assisted to expel ISIS from its Caliphate lands.
The United States Forces provide important capabilities that our local partners do not have. The Kurd, the Kurdish Arab forces, do not have the same intelligence assets, air assets, or mobile capabilities that the U.S. has, and given that ISIS is trying to reconstitute itself, the capabilities of detecting them and being able to move and strike them, those are all capabilities that we will need present in Northeast Syria for a long time.
In addition, U.S. forces are extremely important because the Kurds, with whom we are partnered, face an additional pressure, namely from Turkey, which has historically been fighting a war against a Kurdish element that engages in terror attacks across the Syrian Turkish border.
As Turkey is ratcheting up its efforts to take over terrain in Northeast Syria or even to control a zone, a corridor between Syria and Turkey. It is actually going to try to expel the Syrian Democratic Forces from that area.
The Kurds historically have prioritized defending their lands against the Turks over defending other people's lands against ISIS. And so without the U.S. presence, it is likely that the Syrian Democratic Forces will reallocate their assets out of the areas where ISIS is most dangerous and move them to areas that are very important to Kurds and their families, much closer to Turkey, and that will leave ISIS somewhat unchallenged.
Lastly, U.S. forces in Northeast Syria are essential for preventing Iranian proxies, Russian proxies, and the Assad Regime from actually controlling Syria's key wealth resource, namely the oil fields in Eastern Syria.
The United States and its partners right now actually control those areas. Should the United States actually depart from Northeast Syria, it will leave these areas to the regime and its allies. And the United States will thereby undermine the concerted efforts that it has placed on the regime, and on Russia, and on Iran through its sanction regimen, by giving them access to oil and gas wells from which they can reconstitute their economic wellbeing.
We must not imagine that the U.S. has no geopolitical interest in Northeast Syria other than ISIS. Rather, we must see that it has geopolitical interests that include ISIS, Iran, and Syria, as well as the relationship with our ally Turkey and the rivalry with our competitor, Russia. Our presence in that area is what is diminishing the ability of all of the other actors in the area to ratchet up violence against one another in a way that is likely to undermine U.S. strategy in the entire Middle East.
Get more facts in this ISW Report on Syria.
The Cipher Brief brings you a range of expert perspectives on the Syria situation. Read also The Limits of U.S. Influence in Syria from Gen. Jack Keane (Ret.) and An Epilogue for Syria from Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt (Ret.)
