Plan to expand bombing campaign in Syria stalls amid U.S.-Turkey disagreements
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Version 0 of 1. A plan to expand the U.S.-led coalition bombing campaign against the Islamic State in Syria, along the Turkish border west of the besieged town of Kobane, has been put on hold because Turkey and the Obama administration have failed to agree on its parameters. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan “continues to have a different geographic priority,” a senior administration official said, and is still primarily focused on Aleppo and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. “We want to go after ISIL,” the official said, referring to the Islamic State. Assad’s military surrounds, and regularly bombards from the air, Western-backed moderate opposition fighters and civilians in Aleppo, Syria’s second-largest city, in the northwest corner of the country. Turkey fears that Aleppo’s fall would not only add to the 1.6 million refugees who have already crossed its border from Syria and Iraq, but also would undermine its main priority of pushing Assad from power. The White House agrees that Assad’s departure is an important goal, but its principal concern is the Islamic State, whose forces occupy much of lightly populated northern and eastern Syria, along with a wide swath of Iraq. The United States began airstrikes against the militants in both countries last summer, while resisting entreaties from Turkey and other regional partners to become directly involved in the four-year fight to oust Assad. As Washington and Ankara have struggled toward a meeting of the minds, President Obama last month authorized U.S. military and diplomatic officials to pursue a plan to use U.S. air attacks against Islamic State forces along the Turkish border, some distance northeast of Aleppo and considerably to the west of where the strikes have been focused so far. Officials who described the plan, and the disagreements, spoke on the condition of anonymity about the sensitive diplomatic matter. Under the plan, Turkey would then populate the area with refugees, opposition fighters and some of its own special forces troops, who could help coordinate additional airstrikes as the Islamic State was pushed eastward. Flights for the operation would be allowed to operate out of Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, which Ankara has thus far forbidden for use in the Syria air campaign. But while senior military-to-military talks on the plan took place in late December and lower-level conversations are continuing, the two sides have not reached agreement on the geographical outline of the operation. Turkey is not alone in its frustration with U.S. reluctance to take on Assad. Within the coalition itself, there is broad agreement to attack the Islamic State. But unanimity of purpose in Iraq, where European allies have joined with the United States in striking the militants, has not been achieved in Syria. There are effectively two separate wars and at least three sets of combatants in Syria, where U.S. airstrikes against the Islamic State are being conducted with Arab partners. Some of them — along with Turkey — believe the focus should be as much, or more, on aiding the opposition struggle against Assad as on fighting the Islamist militants. Although the administration has called for a negotiated solution to the conflict between Assad and the moderate opposition, some U.S. partners question how that can be accomplished as long as Assad and his military remain relatively strong and the opposition is increasingly weak. As the administration seeks to avoid its own fight with Assad, its proposed solution has been to gradually strengthen the opposition, both politically and militarily, into a force with which the Syrian leader must reckon. Obama tapped Maj. Gen. Michael K. Nagata in September to organize a training program for opposition fighters, and Congress has agreed to fund the effort. But it has been slow to get off the ground amid U.S. concerns that participants be carefully chosen and fully vetted to guard against insider attacks from militant sympathizers. “We’ve learned the hard way that . . . that’s something we’ve got to be ever-vigilant on,” the Pentagon press secretary, Rear Adm. John F. Kirby, told reporters Friday. Insider attacks have been a frequent problem for U.S. forces in Afghanistan. The first 500 opposition members are expected to start being trained by U.S. forces in Jordan this spring. Additional training camps are being set up in Saudi Arabia and Turkey, with no date determined for when they will be operational. Kirby said several hundred U.S. troops, most of them Special Forces, will participate in the training along with support personnel, which will bring the total number of U.S. service members deployed for the effort to about 1,000 or more. Although the administration has told Congress that it hopes to train up to 5,400 fighters in the first year, “there has been no active recruiting yet,” Kirby said. “General Nagata just met this week in Istanbul with Syrian opposition leadership” and civil society leaders. “But this was an introductory meeting. It was a chance to better understand the challenges that the opposition leadership is facing itself in organizing groups and units, and a chance to wrap our arms around the scope of the recruiting mission and how difficult it’s going to be,” Kirby said. While some of the trainees are to be recruited from the opposition Free Syrian Army, others are to be gathered from communities threatened but not occupied by the Islamic State. The hope is that they will go back to their communities to organize political forces and “help defend their neighbors,” Kirby said. The focus on using trained opposition fighters to defend their communities against the Islamic State — rather than Assad — as a first order of business has again concerned U.S. partners. Kirby said the fighters would “eventually go on the offensive against ISIL inside Syria,” and as a third priority would “help work with political opposition leaders towards a political solution in Syria.” Meanwhile, Turkey lashed out last week at Western leaders who have suggested it is not doing enough to prevent European supporters of the Islamic State, most of them Muslims, from landing in Istanbul and making their way across the border into Syria. The issue erupted after it was learned that Hayat Boumeddiene, allegedly an associate of one of the perpetrators of this month’s terrorist attacks in Paris, traveled in early January from France to Spain and boarded a flight from Madrid to Istanbul. She is believed to have subsequently entered Syria. “Is it Turkey’s fault that it has a border with Syria?” Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said to reporters in Germany after a meeting last week with Chancellor Angela Merkel. “We cannot treat people as terrorists by merely looking at their names. We have to be given intelligence.” Boumeddiene’s name was not on European terrorist lists given to Turkey. “We are ready for all forms of cooperation in the field of intelligence — 7,000 people have been prevented from crossing our borders on the basis of information provided,” Davutoglu said, adding that “1,500 to 2,000 people were also sent back to European countries.” |