quote [ The U.S. is being drawn into a bitter struggle over territory liberated from the Islamic State. ]
Remember how some people refused to vote for Hillary Clinton because she was a 'warmonger'?
Other than WaPo, remarkably little media coverage of this potentially major development.
Reveal
With a show of Stars and Stripes, U.S. forces in Syria try to keep warring allies apart
By Liz Sly
March 8 at 5:30 PM
BEIRUT — The U.S. military is getting drawn into a deepening struggle for control over areas liberated from the Islamic State that risks prolonging American involvement in wars in Syria and Iraq long after the militants are defeated.
In their first diversion from the task of fighting the Islamic State since the U.S. military’s involvement began in 2014, U.S. troops dispatched to Syria have headed in recent days to the northern town of Manbij, 85 miles northwest of the extremists’ capital, Raqqa, to protect their Kurdish and Arab allies against a threatened assault by other U.S. allies in a Turkish-backed force.
Russian troops have also shown up in Manbij under a separate deal that was negotiated without the input of the United States, according to U.S. officials. Under the deal, Syrian troops are to be deployed in the area, also in some form of peacekeeping role, setting up what is effectively a scramble by the armies of four nations to carve up a collection of mostly empty villages in a remote corner of Syria.
The latest twist in Syria’s ever more complicated war points to one of the many risks of a U.S. strategy that has prioritized the military defeat of the Islamic State at the expense of political solutions to the broader conflicts fueling instability in the wider region, analysts say.
Photographs and videos posted on social media in recent days have shown convoys of U.S. troops, including Stryker armored vehicles and Humvees, heading through the northern Syrian countryside trailing big Stars and Stripes flags. They have taken up positions in the villages north and west of Manbij, where U.S.-allied Arab forces backed by Kurds have been fighting for more than a week with U.S.-allied Arab forces backed by Turkey, according to U.S. and local officials.
The public display, unusual for a small U.S. presence of mostly Special Operations troops officially numbering just 503, is deliberate, a Pentagon spokesman, Capt. Joe Davis, told reporters this week. “We want to have a visible show that we’re there,” he said, adding that the goal is to urge all parties to “stay focused on the common enemy, which is ISIS.”
Other wars are brewing elsewhere across the vast areas freed so far from Islamic State control, in Iraq as well as Syria. In recent days, the United States has been mediating between rival Kurdish factions in Iraq, both of them indirectly allied to the United States in the fight against the Islamic State, after clashes erupted around the northwestern town of Snune, freed from the Islamic State more than two years ago.
Manbij is the first instance, however, in which U.S. troops have become directly involved in keeping rival factions apart. The Pentagon has described their mission as one to “reassure and deter” local parties from attacking one another, a new role for the U.S. military in the Islamic State war, and one that could set a trend for the remaining cities to be conquered.
The deployment is “fraught with risk,” said Robert Ford, who served as the Obama administration’s last ambassador to Syria until 2014. He is now with the Washington-based Middle East Institute and teaches at Yale University.
“That’s not a small policy change. It is a huge policy change,” he said. “We have never in our Syrian policy ever put U.S. personnel in between warring Syrian factions or to maintain a local cease-fire.”
The deployment does not appear to signal a departure from the Obama administration’s policy of relying on Syrian Kurds and their Arab cohorts to fight the Islamic State in Syria, he said. The Trump administration has not announced the result of a review of the Obama administration’s policy for fighting the Islamic State, but U.S. officials have indicated that although it may involve more U.S. troops, it won’t diverge significantly from the original plan to rely on a force dominated by Syrian Kurds to continue the fight against the militants in Syria.
In pursuit of the plan, the Pentagon said Wednesday that U.S. Marines from the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit have arrived in Syria to set up an artillery base, marking the first officially announced deployment of conventional U.S. troops in Syria.
The Manbij confusion does, however, point to the contradictions of a strategy that has focused on arming local factions to take on the Islamic State without regard to existing rivalries, said Aaron Stein of the Washington-based Atlantic Council. Military officials in Washington “are just laserlike focused on ISIS,” he said. “All this other stuff is on the back burner.”
The defeat of the Islamic State in Manbij last August offered an example of the complications likely to arise. Hailed as a significant military victory over the militants, the capture of Manbij cut the road between their capital in Raqqa and the Turkish border and paved the way for the ongoing, four-month-old offensive led by Kurdish forces to isolate Raqqa from the surrounding countryside.
It also, however, left the Kurdish People’s Protection Units, or YPG, in control of Manbij, in contravention of assurances the United States had offered to Turkey that the group would withdraw after the town was captured. Turkey objects to the YPG’s expanding presence in northern Syria because of its close ties to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which has been waging a three-decade insurgency inside Turkey. Manbij’s strategic location west of the Euphrates River gave the Kurds a significant beachhead from which to advance the borders of the autonomous region they are creating in northern Syria.
Within weeks of the battle’s conclusion, Turkish troops crossed the border into Syria, with U.S. support, saying they wanted to join the fight against the Islamic State but also to push back against the Kurds. Advances by Turkish troops and their Syrian rebel allies culminated in the confrontations around Manbij over the past week between the U.S.-backed fighters on opposite sides of the Kurdish-Turkish divide.
The Manbij deployment has not yet affected U.S. plans for taking Raqqa, Davis said. But it does raise new questions about the viability of the U.S. plan to capture Raqqa, an overwhelmingly Arab city, by a force that is commanded mostly by Kurds.
To alleviate Turkish concerns about the U.S. relationship with the Syrian Kurds, the U.S. military has created a parallel, Arab force called the Syrian Democratic Forces that is allied with the Kurdish YPG but comprises recruits drawn from local Arab populations. U.S. Special Operations troops have now trained thousands of Arab recruits, who are expected to be put on the front lines of the eventual battle for Raqqa.
The SDF is also the force that negotiated the deal with Russia to have Syrian troops police the front line between the rival Manbij fighters — without U.S. input, according to U.S. officials.
That has fueled concerns among some of the Arab fighters recruited by the United States that their participation in the force will result in turning over areas they fight for back to the Syrian government, said Ahmed Mohammed of the Syrian Institute for Justice, who is from Manbij and has relatives in the city. Though SDF leaders owe loyalty to the Kurdish YPG, many rank-and-file fighters once belonged to the Syrian rebel groups that originally ousted the Syrian government from Manbij in the early years of the war, and they don’t want a deal that would bring the government back into the area, he said.
The fighters “have a lot of worry, but they don’t have any power,” he said. “It’s a big mess, and we are scared about the future of the people living in Manbij.”
Meanwhile, the U.S. presence in the area does not appear to have ended the fighting. Battles continued west of Manbij on Wednesday, according to both sides. A video posted on social media Wednesday morning showed U.S.-armed Arab fighters allied to the Kurds using an antitank missile to destroy a military vehicle belonging to the Arab fighters allied to Turkey. Though the provenance of the missile could not be ascertained, U.S. officials have confirmed that they began providing antitank missiles to the SDF late last year.
“This war is just so messy,” Stein said. “If we’re going to go into Syria and fight the Islamic State, we’re going to create a whole lot of wreckage. We’ve interjected ourselves into a multisided war.”
Also-
Marines have arrived in Syria to fire artillery in the fight for Raqqa
Reveal
Marines have arrived in Syria to fire artillery in the fight for Raqqa
By Dan Lamothe and Thomas Gibbons-Neff
March 8 at 1:54 PM
U.S. Marines with the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit attach a concrete barrier to a CH-53E Super Stallion during helicopter external load training at Arta Beach, Djibouti, on Feb. 15. (Lance Cpl. Brandon Maldonado/Marine Corps)
Marines from an amphibious task force have left their ships in the Middle East and deployed to Syria, establishing an outpost from which they can fire artillery guns in support of the fight to take back the city of Raqqa from the Islamic State, defense officials said.
The deployment marks a new escalation in the U.S. war in Syria, and puts more conventional U.S. troops in the battle. Several hundred Special Operations troops have advised local forces there for months, but the Pentagon has mostly shied away from using conventional forces in Syria. The new mission comes as the Trump administration weighs a plan to take back Raqqa, the so-called capital of the Islamic State, that also includes more Special Operations troops and attack helicopters.
The force is part of the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit, which left San Diego on Navy ships in October. The Marines on the ground include part of an artillery battery that can fire powerful 155-millimeter shells from M777 Howitzers, two officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the deployment.
The expeditionary unit’s ground force, Battalion Landing Team 1st Battalion, 4th Marines, will man the guns and deliver fire support for U.S.-backed local forces who are preparing an assault on the city. Additional infantrymen from the unit will provide security while resupplies will be handled by part of the expeditionary force’s combat logistics element. For this deployment, the Marines were flown from Dijibouti to Kuwait and then into Syria, said another defense official with direct knowledge of the operation.
The official added that the Marines movement into Syria was not the byproduct of President Donald Trump’s request of a new plan to take on the Islamic State and that it had “been in the works for sometime.”
“The Marines answer a problem that the [operation] has faced,” the official said. He added that they now provide “all-weather fires considering how the weather is this time of year in northern Syria.”
Lt. Gen. Stephen Townsend, the top U.S. general overseeing the campaign against the Islamic State, has previously said that a small number of conventional soldiers have supported Special Operations troops on the ground in Syria, including through a truck-mounted system known as the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS. The defense official with knowledge of the deployment said Wednesday that the Marines and their Howitzers will supplement, rather than replace, those Army units.
The new Marine mission was disclosed after members of the Army’s elite 75th Ranger Regiment appeared in the Syrian city of Manbij over the weekend in Strykers, heavily armed, eight-wheel armored vehicles. Defense officials said they are there to discourage Syrian or Turkish troops from taking any moves that could shift the focus away from an assault on Islamic State militants.
The Marine mission has similarities to an operation the Marine Corps undertook about a year ago when the U.S. military was preparing to support an assault on the Iraqi city of Mosul. In that case, a force from the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, of Camp Lejeune, N.C., established a fire base south of the city in support of Iraqi and Kurdish troops who were then carrying out operations to isolate Mosul from Islamic State-held territory around it.
The existence of the outpost near Mosul, originally named Fire Base Bell, became public after it was attacked by rockets March 19, 2016, killing Staff Sgt. Louis F. Cardin and wounding at least four other Marines. Defense officials said at the time that they had not disclosed the deployment of Marines there because the base was not fully operational, although photographs released by the Defense Department shortly afterward show Marines launching artillery rounds a day before Cardin’s death.
For the base in Syria to be useful, it must be within about 20 miles of the operations U.S.-backed forces are carrying out. That is the estimated maximum range on many rounds fired from the M777 howitzer. GPS-guided Excalibur rounds, which the Marines also used after establishing Fire Base Bell, can travel closer to 30 miles. Fire support for the Mosul operation has since been turned over to the Army.
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