Three Analysis focusing Of The Syrian Assad’s Criminal Regime & On The cowrdice Of UN As well As The Arab Countries/تعليقات ثلاثة بالإنكليزية تلقي الأضواء على جبن وتخاذل الأمم المتحدة والدول العربية في مواجهة نظام الأسد الإجرامي

Three Analysis focusing Of The Syrian Assad’s Criminal Regime & On The cowrdice Of UN As well As The Arab Countries/تعليقات ثلاثة بالإنكليزية تلقي الأضواء على جبن وتخاذل الأمم المتحدة والدول العربية في مواجهة نظام الأسد الإجرامي

باحثون في جرائم الحروب: أنشأ النظام السوري ميليشيات عي أشباح مرعبة
ستيفاني فان دن بيرج ومايا جيبيلي/ رويترز/ 05 تموز 2023
Syrian regime organised feared ghost militias, war crimes researchers say
Stephanie van den Berg and Maya Gebeily/Reuters/Tue, July 5, 2023

الأمم المتحدة والعرب يتسترون على فظائع بشار الأسد ، بدلاً من اللوم – احزروا من؟
بسام طويل/معهد جيتستون / 5 تموز 2023
UN and Arabs Whitewash Atrocities of Bashar Assad, Instead Blame – Guess Who?
Bassam Tawil/Gatestone Institute/July 04, 2023

هل يجب بقاء القوات الأمريكية في سوريا؟/لورنس أ.فرانكلين/معهد جاتستون/ 5 تموز 2023
Should US Troops Stay in Syria?
Lawrence A. Franklin/Gatestone Institute/July 5, 2023

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باحثون في جرائم الحروب: أنشأ النظام السوري ميليشيات عي أشباح مرعبة
ستيفاني فان دن بيرج ومايا جيبيلي/ رويترز/ 05 تموز 2023
Syrian regime organised feared ghost militias, war crimes researchers say
Stephanie van den Berg and Maya Gebeily/Reuters/Tue, July 5, 2023
In the early years of Syria’s brutal conflict, top government officials established and directed paramilitary groups known as shabbiha to help the state crack down on opponents, war crimes investigators have documented.
In a report shared with Reuters, the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA) published seven documents its investigators said showed that the highest levels of Syria’s government “planned, organised, instigated and deployed” the shabbiha from the start of the war in 2011.
U.N. investigators in 2012 concluded there were reasonable grounds to believe shabbiha militias committed crimes against humanity, including murder and torture, and war crimes such as arbitrary arrest and detention, sexual violence and pillaging.
CIJA’s cache does not contain direct written orders to commit atrocities. The Syrian government did not respond to a request for comment from Reuters. It has previously blamed opposition fighters for several mass killings studied by CIJA in the report. The government has not publicly commented on the shabbiha, which means ghosts in Arabic, or whether it had any role in organising the groups.Dating from as early as January 2011 – the first days of the protests against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s rule – the documents detail the creation of so-called Popular Committees, groups that incorporated regime supporters already known as shabbiha into the security apparatus, and trained, instructed and armed them, the report said. The documents include instructions on March 2, 2011 from military intelligence to local authorities via Security Committees run by Assad’s Baath party leaders to “mobilise” informers, grassroots organisations and so-called friends of the Assad government. In further documents in April they are ordered to form them into Popular Committees.
They also contain instructions in April, May and August, 2011 to Popular Committees from the newly-established Central Crisis Management Committee (CCMC), a mix of security forces, intelligence agencies and top officials that reported directly to Assad, the report said. One of the CCMC’s first directives, dated April 18, 2011, and included in full in the report, ordered the Popular Committees to be trained on how to use weapons against demonstrators, as well as how to arrest them and hand them over to government forces. A German regional court in 2021, in a case against a Syrian intelligence services official, said in its judgment the CCMC was established in March 2011, reporting to Assad as an ad hoc body composed of senior leaders of the security forces. A U.S. district court found in 2019 in a civil case that Assad himself established the CCMC, which the court called “the highest national security body in the Syrian government” and “comprised of senior members of the government”. Reuters reviewed seven documents made available in full in the CIJA report, which was due to be published later on Tuesday. The report also draws on dozens of other papers, which were collected from government or military facilities after territory fell to the rebels. CIJA has not released all the documents it quotes from, saying some are being used in ongoing investigations in European countries. The documents showed the government created the militias “from day one”, rather than latching onto pre-existing grassroot groups, as scholars of the Syrian war previously thought, said Ugur Ungor, an expert on Syrian paramilitaries and a professor of Holocaust and Genocide studies at the Dutch NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, who has reviewed the documents in CIJA’s new report.
PAPER TRAIL
Some human rights scholars who have studied the role of the shabbiha in the Syrian war say the Assad regime initially used the groups to distance itself from violence on the ground. “The regime did not want the security forces and army to be pictured doing these things,” said Fadel Abdul Ghany, chair of the Syrian Network for Human Rights, a UK-based advocacy group. No shabbiha members have been brought to trial in international courts. Ghany, who reviewed the documents, said they could help build such cases. “Here you have the paper trail that shows how these units were mobilized”, one of CIJA’s directors, Nerma Jelacic, told Reuters. CIJA is a nonprofit founded by a veteran war crimes investigator and staffed by international criminal lawyers who have worked in Bosnia, Rwanda and Cambodia. Its evidence on Syria has previously been used in court cases against regime officials conducted in Germany, France, Sweden and the Netherlands.
NINE MASSACRES
CIJA named nine massacres in Syria the reports said involved pro-government militias, including in the neighbourhood of Karm al-Zeytoun in the city of Homs in March 2012. One Syrian man, who asked not to be named as he feared reprisals against relatives still living in government-held zones in Syria, told Reuters his wife and five children were among those killed there. “The shabbiha put them up against the wall, tried to violate them, then shot them,” he said. At the time, he had joined a rebel group and was in a nearby district, al-Adawiya – where another massacre had just taken place, also cited by CIJA.
“The moment I heard that my kids were dead, I was holding a six-month-old baby that had just been killed in Adawiya. So, I was imagining what had happened to my kids,” he said, speaking by telephone from within a rebel-held enclave in northern Syria.
Reuters was not able to independently confirm his account. The CIJA documents showed tensions between some branches of the security forces and some Popular Committees as reports of abuses spread – but rather than rein-in the militias, the security forces issued instructions to not oppose them.
CIJA’s Syria team of 45 people studied the documents to detail the growth of the shabbiha groups from neigbourhood-level loyalist groups to a well-organised militia and later a parallel wing of the army called the National Defence Force (NDF). Reuters earlier reported on the 2012 creation of the NDF.
While there is no international war crimes court with jurisdiction over Syria’s conflict, there are a number of so-called universal jurisdiction cases in countries like the Netherlands, Sweden, France and Germany which have laws allowing them to prosecute war crimes even if they are committed elsewhere.
Ghany said the documents were “necessary” pieces of evidence linking the shabbiha to the state in international justice cases. “These documents make it possible to pursue people legally – if there are individuals in European countries, then a case can be brought against them,” he told Reuters.
(Reporting by Stephanie Van Den Berg and Maya Gebeily; Editing by Frank Jack Daniel)

الأمم المتحدة والعرب يتسترون على فظائع بشار الأسد ، بدلاً من اللوم – احزروا من؟
بسام طويل/معهد جيتستون / 5 تموز 2023
UN and Arabs Whitewash Atrocities of Bashar Assad, Instead Blame – Guess Who?
Bassam Tawil/Gatestone Institute/July 04, 2023
The League of Arab States (LAS), which represents 22 member countries, has spent several decades issuing statements of condemnation against Israel. Each time Israel launches a counterterrorism operation in response to Palestinian terrorism, including rockets fired from the Gaza Strip towards Israel and shooting, stabbing and car-ramming attacks, it is denounced.
The same League of Arab States, however, has no problem embracing an Arab president whose regime has killed hundreds of thousands of Arabs, including Palestinians and Syrians, since the beginning of the civil war in Syria in 2011.
The LAS… has effectively whitewashed Syrian President Bashar Assad’s atrocities against his own people and Palestinians.
Assad, in his speech before the Arab heads of state, ironically expressed hope that the summit would mark “the beginning of a new phase of Arab action for solidarity among us, for peace in our region, development and prosperity instead of war and destruction.”
Here is an Arab leader, responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Arabs and the displacement of millions more, preaching about “peace, development and prosperity.”
Saudi Arabia played a significant role in welcoming the Assad regime back to the League of Arab States. The Saudis have shown that they prefer to make peace with Assad than normalize their relations with Israel. Drastically cooling years of diplomatic efforts, the Saudis insist that until a Palestinian state has been established, the kingdom will not normalize ties with Israel. If the Saudis are so concerned about the Palestinians, why are they rushing to embrace an Arab dictator whose regime has killed thousands of Palestinians?
With no apparent preconditions for Assad, the League of Arab States is turning its back on more than 500,000 dead Syrians, nearly seven million Syrian refugees, and 13 million displaced Syrians.
According to UN Special Rapporteur, Alena Douhan, the sanctioning countries, including the US, would be interfering in Syria’s right to murder its own people en masse. That would, indeed, be attempting to secure a very specific change in its policy. Wouldn’t not chemically burning entire villages of civilians to death be a better human rights policy?
According to the UN’s Douhan, in yet another report, it is not Assad who should be held accountable and punished with sanctions. It is not Assad who has destroyed Syria’s infrastructure with bombing, murder, and overall devastation, but rather: “Israeli settlements… in the occupied Syrian Golan…. [have] limited the Syrian population’s access to land and water, in violation of their rights to adequate housing, food and health…. The report also contained recommendations [that]… The international community should put in place punitive measures to put an end to these crimes. All dealings with settlers, settlements and the incumbent Prime Minister [Netanyahu] should cease.”
The UN’s concern over the Syrian people’s rights to land and housing is commendable, but where was its outcry when Assad gave a quiet 30 days’ notice to the seven million refugees scattered across the Middle East and beyond to prove ownership of their homes and property or to forfeit ownership? Assad’s”Law 10″ land grab… was met with not a whisper of protest by the UN.
According to Amnesty International: “In 2019, more than two-thirds of all refugees came from just five countries: Syria, Venezuela, Afghanistan, South Sudan and Myanmar….” The Palestinians were not even mentioned.
The UN freely admits that: “The League of Arab States (LAS) shares a common mission with the United Nations (UN): promoting peace, security and stability by preventing conflict, resolving disputes and acting in a spirit of solidarity and unity…. building their engagement through capacity-building exercises and staff exchanges. The Security Council also has sought to strengthen interaction with the LAS….”
With such chummy comradery between these two organizations, including interchangeable staff, it is not a wonder that the UN has strategically placed despotic regimes in its councils and – as demonstrated in resolution after resolution — taken such an aggressively biased stance against Israel.
After 12 years of what then US Secretary of State John Kerry in 2013 called the”moral obscenity” of Assad’s “indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, the killing of women and children and innocent bystanders by chemical weapons,” the UN decries sanctions against the Assad regime, and the Arab League embraces Assad with great honor and not a word of censure.
The outrageous hypocrisy and double-standards of the Arab countries and the UN is astonishing — and unacceptable. The League of Arab States pretends to care about its fellow Arabs, while its good friend, the UN, purports to care about human rights.
“Why has this [UN] Council chosen silence?” UN Watch’s Hillel Neuer asked.”Because Israel could not be blamed. Because, in truth, the despots who run this Council couldn’t care less about Palestinians, or about any human rights. They seek to demonize Israeli democracy, to delegitimize the Jewish state, to scapegoat the Jewish people. They also seek something else: To distort and pervert the very language and idea of human rights.”
The League of Arab States has no problem embracing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whose regime has killed hundreds of thousands of Arabs, including Palestinians and Syrians, since the beginning of the civil war in Syria in 2011.
The League of Arab States (LAS), which represents 22 member countries, has spent several decades issuing statements of condemnation against Israel. Each time Israel launches a counterterrorism operation in response to Palestinian terrorism, including rockets fired from the Gaza Strip towards Israel and shooting, stabbing and car-ramming attacks, it is denounced. The Israeli government is also condemned by the LAS each time it approves the construction of housing units for Jewish families in Jerusalem and the West Bank.
The same League of Arab States, however, has no problem embracing an Arab president whose regime has killed hundreds of thousands of Arabs, including Palestinians and Syrians, since the beginning of the civil war in Syria in 2011.
Since the beginning of the civil war in Syria, 4,214 Palestinians have been killed; another 3,076 Palestinians are being held in prisons belonging to the Syrian regime, while another 333 others have gone missing, according to the Action Group For Palestinians Of Syria, a London-based human rights watchdog group that monitors the situation of Palestinian refugees in Syria.
About 400,000 Palestinian refugees from Syria have been displaced as a result of the war, The United Nations Relief and Work Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) revealed.
“The majority of the 438,000 Palestinian refugees remaining in Syria have been displaced at least once within Syria – with some having been displaced multiple times – and over 95 percent of them remain in continuous need of humanitarian aid to meet their basis needs…. Up to 280,000 Palestinian refugees from Syria are currently displaced inside Syria, with a further 120,000 displaced to neighboring countries, including Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Egypt and increasingly, to Europe. There are 31,000 Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. Many of them have been pushed into a precarious and marginalized existence due to their uncertain legal status and face limited social protection.”
Last year, the United Nations Human Rights Council estimated that 306,887 civilians were killed during the civil war in Syria. Syrian opposition groups estimate that a total of 613,407 people were killed in Syria. The most violent year of the conflict was 2015, when about 110,000 people were killed. Half of the war’s victims died between 2013 and 2015, according to the Council.
The League of Arab States, remembered for its rejectionist 1967 “Three No’s” resolution (no to peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, and no negotiations with Israel), has effectively whitewashed Syrian President Bashar Assad’s atrocities against his own people and Palestinians. In May, Arab foreign ministers agreed to reinstate Syria’s membership in the LAS after its suspension more than 10 years ago. Later, Assad was invited to attend the LAS Summit in Saudi Arabia’s port city of Jeddah.
Assad, in his speech before the Arab heads of state, ironically expressed hope that the summit would mark “the beginning of a new phase of Arab action for solidarity among us, for peace in our region, development and prosperity instead of war and destruction.”
Here is an Arab leader, responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Arabs and the displacement of millions more, preaching about “peace, development and prosperity.”
Saudi Arabia played a significant role in welcoming the Assad regime back to the League of Arab States. The Saudis have shown that they prefer to make peace with Assad than normalize their relations with Israel. Drastically cooling years of diplomatic efforts, the Saudis insist that until a Palestinian state has been established, the kingdom will not normalize ties with Israel. If the Saudis are so concerned about the Palestinians, why are they rushing to embrace an Arab dictator whose regime has killed thousands of Palestinians?
Days after Syria was welcomed to rejoin the LAS, the very same organization called on the international community to “intervene to end Israel’s violations against Palestinian children and ensure the protection of their rights.”
Before Syria was officially welcomed back to the LAS, Assad was invited to the United Arab Emirates where he was received by Emirati royalty with full honors as “a group of honor guards lined up to salute his excellency.”
It is not as though Assad has expressed any contrition whatsoever or admitted an iota of responsibility – whether currently or throughout his rampage of atrocities against his own people. “I did my best to protect the people. I cannot feel guilty when you do your best. You feel sorry for the lives that have been lost. But you don’t feel guilty when you don’t kill people. So it’s not about guilty,” he claimed, astonishingly, in an Barbara Walters interview in 2011.
With no apparent preconditions for Assad, the League of Arab States is turning its back on more than 500,000 dead Syrians, nearly seven million Syrian refugees, and 13 million displaced Syrians.
There had not been any significant repercussions for Assad until then US President Donald Trump authorized the bombing of Syrian chemical weapons facilities in 2018 and signed the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act legislating international sanctions against Syria’s murderous regime in 2019.
The UN adopted “special procedures” resolutions decrying “unilateral coercive measures” in September 2014 (about three months after Assad’s farcical reelection and attempted image rehabilitation), and again in October 2020 (almost immediately following the US’s institution of the Caesar Act sanctions). It seems odd that a human rights body such as the UN would need to take “special procedures” to countermand a “civilian protection act.”
Along with these procedures, the UN appointed Alena Douhan as Special Rapporteur for assessing the humanitarian situation in Syria.
Douhan, in her reports to the UN, rails against the negative impact of sanctions on Syria, but seems less specific about humanitarian issues and more concerned with defining legal terminology:
“Unilateral coercive measures have been defined by the Human Rights Council in its resolutions 27/21 and 45/5. These encompass economic and political measures imposed by one or a group of States to coerce another State into subordination of the exercise of its sovereign rights, with a view to securing some specific change in its policy.”
This would be the very definition of sanctions. According to Douhan, the sanctioning countries, including the US, would be interfering in Syria’s right to murder its own people en masse. That would, indeed, be attempting to secure a very specific change in its policy. Wouldn’t not chemically burning entire villages of civilians to death be a better human rights policy?
Unsurprisingly, the UN seized upon Douhan’s policy-making prowess to tack the subject of “Unilateral Coercive Measures” (UCMs) onto Israel. Douhan requested reports from Palestinian NGOs such as “Palestinian Centre for Human Rights,” which warmed to the newly minted legal terminology and promptly submitted reports such as, “Impact of Israeli Unilateral Coercive Measures on the Right to Health of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”
According to the UN’s Douhan, in yet another report, it is not Assad who should be held accountable and punished with sanctions. It is not Assad who has destroyed Syria’s infrastructure with bombing, murder, and overall devastation, but rather:
“Israeli settlements… in the occupied Syrian Golan…. [have] limited the Syrian population’s access to land and water, in violation of their rights to adequate housing, food and health…. The report also contained recommendations [that]… The international community should put in place punitive measures to put an end to these crimes. All dealings with settlers, settlements and the incumbent Prime Minister [Netanyahu] should cease.”
The UN’s concern over the Syrian people’s rights to land and housing is commendable, but where was its outcry when Assad gave a quiet 30 days’ notice to the seven million refugees scattered across the Middle East and beyond to prove ownership of their homes and property or to forfeit ownership? Assad’s”Law 10″ land grab, where, Salon Syria reports, his government “…liquidate[d] their titles and seize[d] their holdings…. using the law to seize the homes of opposition supporters and give them to its own support base [including selling them to foreign investors],” was met with not a whisper of protest by the UN.
Diametrically opposed to its tacit approval of Assad’s land-seizures is the UN’s obsession with the Palestinian refugees and their “right of return.” Although UN resolution 194 would ostensibly pertain to the right of all refugees to return to their land of birth, if they will “live at peace with their neighbors,” there seems to be little effort in pursuing this in practice for Syrian refugees.
The UN’s prioritizing the Palestinian refugees over the seven million Syrian refugees is incomprehensible, stinks of hypocrisy and seems yet another symptom of how corruptly the UN betrays its own sanctimonious determinations.
Why doesn’t the UN open an entirely new agency solely for Syrian refugees as it did for the Palestinians through UNRWA?
That move, though, seems highly unlikely in light of this year’s UN World Refugee Day report. Four of its six paragraphs railed about, “the Nakba – the event that shattered Palestinian lives… for generations, tracing back to 1947… As the largest and most protracted displaced population since World War II” – thereby completely negating the Syrian refugees, as well as many others.
According to Amnesty International:
“In 2019, more than two-thirds of all refugees came from just five countries: Syria, Venezuela, Afghanistan, South Sudan and Myanmar. Syria has been the main country of origin for refugees since 2014 and at the end of 2019, there were 6.6 million Syrian refugees….”
The Palestinians were not even mentioned.
The Syrians are one of many peoples taking a backseat to Palestinians. An Arab News headline from last month reads: “Sudan war uproots 2.5 million, UN says, as bodies line Darfur streets.” The ensuing article says: “The UN has spoken of possible ‘crimes against humanity’ in Darfur, where the conflict has ‘taken an ethnic dimension.'”
The Sudanese regime responsible for the ongoing massacre, for instance, sits, along with a majority of non-democratic states, on the UN Human Rights Council.
The UN freely admits that:
“The League of Arab States (LAS) shares a common mission with the United Nations (UN): promoting peace, security and stability by preventing conflict, resolving disputes and acting in a spirit of solidarity and unity…. building their engagement through capacity-building exercises and staff exchanges. The Security Council also has sought to strengthen interaction with the LAS….”
With such chummy comradery between these two organizations, including interchangeable staff, it is not a wonder that the UN has strategically placed despotic regimes in its councils and – as demonstrated in resolution after resolution — taken such an aggressively biased stance against Israel.
Mirroring the UN’s bizarre version of events and culpability, only three months before embracing the murderous Assad, the Assistant Secretary General of the LAS denounced “the international community’s silence and apathy toward… the occupied Palestinian territories…. [holding] prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu fully responsible for…an Israeli siege for more than a week…. the international community [must]… utilize all means to put an immediate end to the Israeli regime’s blatant aggression,” Iran’s Tasnim News reported.
After 12 years of what then US Secretary of State John Kerry in 2013 called the”moral obscenity” of Assad’s “indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, the killing of women and children and innocent bystanders by chemical weapons,” the UN decries sanctions against the Assad regime, and the Arab League embraces Assad with great honor and not a word of censure.
The outrageous hypocrisy and double-standards of the Arab countries and the UN is astonishing — and unacceptable. The League of Arab States pretends to care about its fellow Arabs, while its good friend, the UN, purports to care about human rights.
“Why has this [UN] Council chosen silence?” UN Watch’s Hillel Neuer asked.
“Because Israel could not be blamed. Because, in truth, the despots who run this Council couldn’t care less about Palestinians, or about any human rights. They seek to demonize Israeli democracy, to delegitimize the Jewish state, to scapegoat the Jewish people. They also seek something else: To distort and pervert the very language and idea of human rights.”
*Bassam Tawil is a Muslim Arab based in the Middle East.
© 2023 Gatestone Institute. All rights reserved. The articles printed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors or of Gatestone Institute. No part of the Gatestone website or any of its contents may be reproduced, copied or modified, without the prior written consent of Gatestone Institute.
*Enclosed Picture: Yarmouk refugee camp, near Damascus, on May 22, 2018, days after Syrian government forces regained control over the camp. (Photo by Louai Beshara/AFP via Getty Images)
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19777/un-arabs-syria-atrocities

هل يجب بقاء القوات الأمريكية في سوريا؟/لورنس أ.فرانكلين/معهد جاتستون/ 5 تموز 2023
Should US Troops Stay in Syria?
Lawrence A. Franklin/Gatestone Institute/July 5, 2023
The primary agenda of the Russian-Iranian meeting was reportedly “to discuss expelling the United States from Syria, which may indicate Russia’s intent to facilitate Iranian-backed attacks on US forces.”
Above all, the US presence is important as a blocking force to deny Iran an uninterrupted land bridge to Lebanon and the eastern Mediterranean, and to check the Iranian regime’s long-term expansionist dream of “exporting the revolution.”
Iran already effectively controls three countries in addition to its own – Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen – and has been broadening its influence throughout Latin America.
Any drawdown of the US troop presence at al-Tanf will also tempt adversarial “great powers” in Syria — such as Iran, Russia and especially Turkey — to attack US allies in the region, starting with the Kurdish-majority Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
The US presence, in addition, greatly helps safeguard the liberty of countless Syrians from the tyrannical Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad…
The pro-democratic forces in Syria and border regions in Iraq also help to prevent the remnants of the Islamic State (ISIS) from reconstituting itself into a robust terrorist entity, as they have already started to do.
US Assistant Secretary of Defense Celeste Wallander, during her September 2022 visit to the region, characterized the mission of these forces as “to ensure the enduring defeat of ISIS.”
Departure also would likely further decrease confidence in US pledges to defend vulnerable democracies throughout the world. Both Taiwan and archipelago countries in Southeast Asia would probably be the most affected by any US plan that abandoned the Kurds to Turkey, Iran and ISIS.
A withdrawal of US forces from their current Syrian redoubts will almost certainly imperil the sovereignty of Iraq, Syria as well as the mission of Kurdish troops. These missions include: guarding prisons that hold hundreds of incarcerated ISIS jihadists as well as monitoring the expansive displaced persons camp at al-Hol, which hosts tens of thousands of the wives and children of ISIS jihadists.
If the Kurds are not able to execute their mission of suppressing ISIS, the failure would quickly lead to a rapid expansion of the terrorist group.
[C]losure of the US mission in Syria would cause alarm among allies and risk accelerating an already precipitous decline in US influence throughout the Middle East…. There is little doubt that the image of US primacy on the world stage, as after the catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan, will deteriorate even further. Ally and adversary alike will seek non-American alternatives to protect their national interests.
Although continued US troop presence in Syria is not without risk, withdrawal from the region would no doubt trigger an even greater risk to America’s interests — while remaining in Syria accomplishes much at minimal cost.
Above all, the US military presence in Syria is important as a blocking force to deny Iran an uninterrupted land bridge to Lebanon and the eastern Mediterranean, and to check the Iranian regime’s long-term expansionist dream of “exporting the revolution.” Pictured: US soldiers take position as they patrol in al-Qahtaniyah in Syria’s northeastern Hasakah province, on June 14, 2023. (Photo by Delil Souleiman/AFP via Getty Images)
A Syrian website run by opponents of the Assad regime recently reported that in early June that Russian military officials in Syria’s Deir ez-Zor Province met with Iranian operatives. The primary agenda of the Russian-Iranian meeting was reportedly “to discuss expelling the United States from Syria, which may indicate Russia’s intent to facilitate Iranian-backed attacks on US forces.”
After a series of Iran-directed attacks on U.S. military outposts in Syria and the kinetic responses from American forces, leaked documents indicate that Iran is planning to target US armored vehicles in Syria by with remotely-detonated roadside bombs.
Iranian trainers and Lebanese Hezbollah operatives continue to prepare pro-Iranian jihadists in Syria, such as the Kata’ib Hezbollah, to wage an extended and more lethal campaign against Syria-based US forces. One media report claims that additional trainers from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) have arrived in Deir ez-Zor Province to train the local jihadists in the use of advanced drones and explosive devices to inflict more casualties on US troops.
The US, presumably in anticipation of heightened hostilities, on June 10 reinforced its military posts in al-Hasakah with a convoy of armored vehicles, fuel trucks and ammunition.
Some commentators claim that the US has no vital interest in maintaining a troop presence in Syria, and that Syria is no longer sovereign, just a failed and fragmented state. Others fear that America could get drawn into another war in the Middle East. Still others claim that that “the US has already lost in Syria.”
While many of these apprehensions may be justifiable — surrender, of course, is always an option, if not always a good one — there are persuasive political and military reasons for the US to maintain a military presence in Syria. Above all, the US presence is important as a blocking force to deny Iran an uninterrupted land bridge to Lebanon and the eastern Mediterranean, and to check the Iranian regime’s long-term expansionist dream of “exporting the revolution.”
Iran already effectively controls three countries in addition to its own – Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen – and has been broadening its influence throughout Latin America.
The major US troop presence in Syria is at a base at al-Tanf, in at a strategic point on the tri-border point of Syria, Iraq, and Jordan. Absent this base, Tehran could deliver weapons from Iranian-dominated Syria across the border to Hezbollah-controlled territory in Lebanon. Such a thoroughfare would also increase Iran’s capacity to threaten Israel with extinction as it has been threatening to do since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Iran has already attacked Israel from Syria through one of its many proxy forces, Lebanese Hezbollah, as well regularly smuggling missiles and other arms through Syria into Lebanon, for Hezbollah to use in attacking Israel.
Any drawdown of the US troop presence at al-Tanf will also tempt adversarial “great powers” in Syria — such as Iran, Russia and especially Turkey — to attack US allies in the region, starting with the Kurdish-majority Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). Additionally, any decision to gradually reduce the American troop presence simply increases the vulnerability of remaining US personnel to drone attacks or other assaults.
The US presence, in addition, greatly helps safeguard the liberty of countless Syrians from the tyrannical Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad, and helps to keep alive the idea of a democratic Syria, free of regional powers such as, again, Russia, Turkey and Iran.
The pro-democratic forces in Syria and border regions in Iraq also help to prevent the remnants of the Islamic State (ISIS) from reconstituting itself into a robust terrorist entity, as they have already started to do.
The mostly Kurdish US-allied local forces have already lost more than 11,000 fighters in their long campaign against ISIS. The US depends upon these Kurdish troops to keep remaining ISIS fighters in the region confined to low level of operational activity. US Assistant Secretary of Defense Celeste Wallander, during her September 2022 visit to the region, characterized the mission of these forces as “to ensure the enduring defeat of ISIS.”
US Special Forces advisors, trainers, and soldiers, deployed in several outposts in northeast Syria, by organizing joint security patrols and checkpoints, also serve as a “bridge of trust” between the Iraqi Army and the Kurdish fighters. The continued presence of US military personnel in Syria helps monitor cooperation between the Iraqi Army and Kurdish forces who share the responsibility to patrol the Internal Disputed Boundary (IDB) between Iraq and the autonomous Iraqi Provinces of Kurdistan, where ISIS terrorists remain active and which requires constant surveillance.
Additional reasons for US forces to remain in Syria include the ability to check the power of dozens of pro-Iranian militias (“Popular Mobilization Forces”) which threaten Iraqi sovereignty. The US has attacked hostile pro-Iranian groups in Syria, and US contractors have been extracting oil from Iraqi fields, thereby enabling Baghdad to maintain a solvent regime, with funds to pay Iraqi soldiers and government officials.
A withdrawal of US forces from their current Syrian redoubts will almost certainly imperil the sovereignty of Iraq, Syria as well as the mission of Kurdish troops. These missions include: guarding prisons that hold hundreds of incarcerated ISIS jihadists as well as monitoring the expansive displaced persons camp at al-Hol, which hosts tens of thousands of the wives and children of ISIS jihadists.
If the Kurds are not able to execute their mission of suppressing ISIS, the failure would quickly lead to a rapid expansion of the terrorist group.
Moreover, if US troops no longer served as a blocking force, Turkey would doubtless be sorely tempted to invade Kurdish areas of Syria now controlled by local Kurds. The Turkish government has long claimed dominance over the Kurds in Syria and Iraq. And the terrorist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) has targeted Turkey for decades.
Most gravely, closure of the US mission in Syria would cause alarm among allies and risk accelerating an already precipitous decline in US influence throughout the Middle East.
Departure also would likely further decrease confidence in US pledges to defend vulnerable democracies throughout the world. Both Taiwan and archipelago countries in Southeast Asia would probably be the most affected by any US plan that abandoned the Kurds to Turkey, Iran and ISIS. There is little doubt that the image of US primacy on the world stage, as after the catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan, will deteriorate even further. Ally and adversary alike will seek non-American alternatives to protect their national interests.
Although a continued US troop presence in Syria is not without risk, withdrawal from the country would no doubt trigger an even greater risk to America’s interests — while remaining in Syria accomplishes much, at minimal cost.
*Dr. Lawrence A. Franklin was the Iran Desk Officer for Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. He also served on active duty with the U.S. Army and as a Colonel in the Air Force Reserve.
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