PHOTO: New Syrian Army fighters in eastern Syria
US warplanes withdrew support for an offensive last week by the New Syrian Army against the Islamic State in eastern Syria, contributing to the defeat of the operation, according to American officials.
The NSA was created last year to fight ISIS near the Jordanian and Iraqi borders. Backed by US arms and special forces, it took the town of al-Tanf and the nearby crossing with Iraq in March. However, in May an ISIS bombing killed a number of fighters, leading to speculation that the group was in trouble.
The NSA responded with last week’s assault on the town of al-Bukamal on the Iraqi border, 200 miles north of al-Tanf. The Army initially claimed success with the seizing of territory near the town, including a defunct airport, and the activation of sleeper cells. However, within hours the Islamic State had recaptured the areas, seizing vehicles and weapons and killing at least five NSA fighters.
Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Liz Sly report for The Washington Post:
U.S. Jets Abandoned Syrian Rebels in the Desert. Then They Lost a Battle to ISIS.
American warplanes were diverted from an offensive launched against the Islamic State last week by U.S.-backed rebels in Syria in order to bomb a more enticing target in Iraq, withdrawing air support at a critical moment and contributing to the failure of the rebel operation, according to U.S. officials familiar with the incident.
Aircraft assigned to provide cover for the offensive, launched June 28 to capture the eastern Syrian town of Bukamal, were ordered in the middle of the operation to leave the area and head instead to the outskirts of Fallujah, in neighboring Iraq, the officials said.
A large convoy of Islamic State fighters had been seen trying to escape across the desert after the city was recaptured by the Iraqi army, and U.S. commanders decided that the convoy represented a “strategic target,” said Col. Chris Garver, a U.S. military spokesman.
The convoy was destroyed by the U.S. and British planes along with gunships and aircraft from the Iraqi air force, which began striking the long line of Islamic State vehicles before the U.S. Air Force arrived. Hundreds of Islamic State fighters were killed and scores of their vehicles were destroyed in one of the more spectacular single assaults against the militants in the nearly two-year-old war against them.
By that time, however, the fighters of the Pentagon-trained New Syrian Army were in retreat, beaten back by the Islamic State to their desert base more than 200 miles away at Tanf, on the Syrian-Iraqi border. The failure of the operation was a significant blow to the Pentagon’s Syria strategy of building a Syrian Arab force capable of taking on the Islamic State.
The diversion of air forces also calls into question whether the U.S. military and its coalition allies have committed enough resources to the war against the Islamic State, which is now being waged on multiple fronts across a large swath of territory in Syria and Iraq.
Defending the decision to withdraw air support from the battle in Syria, Garver said: “You have a finite number of resources and you try to get the biggest bang for buck that you can out of the resources you have. … Prioritization was given to one target over another.”
The U.S. military’s daily record of air strikes conducted in Iraq and Syria shows that eight strikes were conducted in Bukamal on the day the offensive was launched — but only one on the day it crumbled. For the bombing of the Fallujah convoy, the U.S. Air Force “put everything up in the air,” Garver said, including B-52 bombers and AC-130 Spectre gunships.
“The priority here appeared to be going after the target, going after the big shiny object,” said David Maxwell, a former Special Forces officer and the associate director of Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program, after being informed of the strikes. “It’s the manifestation of a mind-set of the last 15 years, of these drone strikes and Special Operations force raids, where we want to achieve immediate effects on the battlefield without thinking about what might fall to the wayside.”
The decision to attack the convoy left the New Syrian Army without air cover and struggling to maintain early gains in an operation that was already teetering on the brink of failure.