The US military commander in charge of the Iraq-Syria war has tacitly rebuked pledges by leading Republican presidential contenders to “carpet-bomb” the Islamic State.



Though army Lieutenant General Sean MacFarland did not call out Donald Trump and Ted Cruz by name, he rejected what he called “indiscriminate” bombing as illegal, immoral and un-American.

“We are bound by the laws of armed conflict and at the end of the day it doesn’t only matter whether or not you win, it matters how you win,” MacFarland told reporters on Monday.

As Iowans were set to caucus in the first presidential contest of 2016, MacFarland said “indiscriminate bombing, where we don’t care if we’re killing innocents or combatants, is just inconsistent with our values”, despite two major White House contenders adopting it as a central proposal against Isis.

Trump, the Republican frontrunner, told an Iowa crowd he would “bomb the shit out of ’em … there would be nothing left”. His closest rival, the Texas senator Ted Cruz, has repeatedly vowed to pursue the “fundamentally different military strategy” of carpet-bombing Isis without “apology”, most recently in last Thursday’s debate.

“We will carpet-bomb [Isis] into oblivion,” Cruz said in Iowa last month.

MacFarland said the proposal contravened military professionalism and likened it to “what the Russians have been accused of doing in parts of north-west Syria”.

Russia’s authoritarian president, Vladimir Putin, and Trump have traded praise. MacFarland characterized Putin’s airstrikes on behalf of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad as a divergent objective from the US goal of defeating Isis.

Though MacFarland said his goal was to get home to his grandchildren, it is likely he will remain in command through the presidential election, and will in any case largely shape the war the next president will inherit.

Unlike previous military officials and even the man who appointed him last fall, defense secretary Ashton Carter, MacFarland pointedly declined to provide reporters with specifics about the changing nature of the war in Iraq and Syria, particularly over key details such as prospective US troop increases or the recently expanded role of special operations forces.

“I’d like the enemy to find out for the first time when the area around them is going up in smoke,” MacFarland said.

Yet MacFarland telegraphed that he was looking at proposing “additional troops” for the fight, particularly as he examines military capabilities that the current effort lacks. He characterized the war as closer to the beginning than the end, stating that the “beginning of the end” will come when Isis loses its Syrian capital, Raqqa.

MacFarland said the December recapture of Ramadi from Isis represented a “turning point” in proving the prowess of the long-sponsored Iraqi military. A forthcoming push to retake Mosul, Isis’s power base in Iraq and the country’s second-largest city, could also include US attack helicopters, he said, in an intensification of US air support for what is expected to be a large operation this year.

Yet MacFarlane indicated that ridding Iraq of Isis completely is an unlikely goal. Defeating Isis “as currently configured” in Iraq – a conventional force that holds territory and fights along front lines – would not rule out its persistence as a “low-grade insurgency [or] terrorist organization”, even if Iraqi forces backed by the US and Iran reclaim the areas Isis currently occupies.

As an army colonel in 2006 in Ramadi, MacFarland made his reputation by embracing a nascent split between Sunni tribal chiefs and the faction of al-Qaida that would, years later, transform into Isis. A decision by MacFarland, later adopted by higher US command, to align with Iraqi fighters he and other commanders had previously understood to be enemies became the genesis of the “Awakening”, a realignment of allegiances that aided the Iraq war’s greatest period of tactical success.

But what the military has regarded as a turning point in the Iraq war has proven difficult to emulate. A program inspired by the Awakening, the Afghan Local Police, has yielded instead turf battles within US-sponsored Afghan ministries and allegations of human-rights violations. Around the time MacFarland took control of the war – an October 2015 move to consolidate a sprawling effort under a single officer – the Pentagon abandoned an expensive initiative to build a Sunni Syrian fighting force and opted instead to sponsor existing Kurdish and Sunni militant forces.

While MacFarland and other US military officials have characterized the airstrikes against Isis as among the most precise in the history of warfare, the US has recently begun conceding that it has mistakenly killed and wounded civilians.

The private organization Airwars, which attempts to track the civilian impact of the bombing, has tallied allegations of between 2,029 and 2,635 noncombatants mistakenly killed in nearly 18 months of bombings, two orders of magnitude beyond what US military officials have confirmed.

MacFarlane rejected criticism that recent attacks on Mosul facilities where Isis keeps its cash risked targeting civilians.

“Is an enemy banker a combatant or not? Just because he doesn’t have an AK[-47] leaned up against a teller window, he’s still a bad guy, right?” MacFarland said, stating that the US airstrikes occur during times the US assesses will minimize loss of life.

Hawkish legislators and presidential candidates have proposed loosening the rules under which US pilots can open fire on targets, claiming that the US hamstrings itself in target selection out of fear of inflicting additional death on civilians in areas where Isis operates.

MacFarland neither stated that he felt unreasonably constricted nor indicated sympathy to the critique, instead portraying distinctions between military from civilian targets as a battlefield advantage.

“Right now we have the moral high ground, and I think that’s where we need to stay,” he said.