The Battle for Raqqa – It’s Complicated

By Barak Barfi

Barak Barfi is a research fellow at New America, where he specializes in Arab and Islamic Affairs. Previously, Barak was a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution. His articles have appeared in the Washington Post, International Herald Tribune, Foreign Policy, Daily Beast, the Atlantic and the New Republic, in addition to being regularly featured in Project Syndicate. He has also extensively published in leading foreign publications such as Australia's The Australian, Austria's Der Standard, England's The Guardian, Germany's Die Welt and Spain's El Pais. Barak has published several monographs and encyclopedia articles on topics such as al-Qaeda, Libya and Yemen. Barak frequently testifies before Congress on issues ranging from al-Qaeda to the Syrian conflict. Before entering the think tank world, Barak worked as a correspondent for Associated Press and as a producer for ABC News affiliates where he reported from countries such as Iraq and Lebanon. He has lived in half a dozen Middle East countries including Libya and Yemen. Barak did his undergraduate work at the University of Michigan and his graduate studies at Columbia University. He is fluent in Arabic and French and proficient in German.

Though the battle to defeat the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in Mosul is slowly reaching its denouement, the campaign to take the jihadists’ Syrian stronghold of Raqqa has not experienced similar success. Insufficient combat-ready troops, a shortage of heavy artillery and ominous tensions between Kurds and Turks have come together to delay the capture of the city. Though Washington has sought to address these concerns – most recently by airlifting Arab and Kurdish forces – its policies are further entrenching its troops in a conflict from which they might not be able to extricate themselves.

After one of its train-and-equip programs in Syria collapsed in October 2015, Washington asked the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its military arm, the Peoples Protection Units (YPG) to assemble an Arab coalition to continue the initiative under its aegis. The Kurds gathered several groups to create the Syrian Defense Forces (SDF) to fight ISIS in Syria. Though SDF spokesmen claim they have between 50,000 and 54,000 troops, the real number is likely slightly lower. American commanders estimate that Arabs comprise 60 percent of these fighters while Kurds constitute 40 percent. They have boasted that since the operation to take Raqqa commenced on November 5, the SDF has captured more than 7,400 square kilometers of territory from ISIS.

“The Cipher Brief has become the most popular outlet for former intelligence officers; no media outlet is even a close second to The Cipher Brief in terms of the number of articles published by formers.” —Sept. 2018, Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 62

Access all of The Cipher Brief’s national security-focused expert insight by becoming a Cipher Brief Subscriber+ Member.

Subscriber+

Categorized as:InternationalTagged with:

Related Articles

How Safe Would We Be Without Section 702?

SUBSCRIBER+EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW — A provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that has generated controversy around fears of the potential for abuse has proven to be crucial […] More

Search

Close