January 27, 2015

Syria: IS Gives Up On Kobani, U.S. Rehabilitates Assad

The Islamic State has finally given up its attack on the Kurdish-Syrian town Kobani on the border to Turkey. It took 18 weeks to understand what deadly game the U.S. was playing there.

After pressuring Turkey the US. had inserted Kurdish fighters and forward air controllers (FACs) into the besieged city. These sucked Islamic State fighters into position where the FACs could observe them and direct U.S. air attacks onto them.

The tactic was used sparsely but that is what it made valuable. The Islamic State fighters fell for it again and again. One wave of reserves after the other was sucked into observable positions and destroyed. During four and a half month some 600 air-strikes killed about 1,400 Islamic State fighters around Kobani including high ranking commanders, important scholars and many foreigners. 600 air strikes during such a long time frame is a low number. During the 2006 Lebanon war the Israeli air force flew about as many strikes per day. But that low number deceived the Islamic State and let it believe that it could win a fight which in reality turned out to be a meat grinder.

The campaign is an important loss for the Islamic State because it shows that it is not invincible and can be defeated in a combined air and ground campaign when its fighters are attacking fixed targets. But this tactic will only work when the Islamic State army is out in the open, at the end of its logistic chain and attacking an buildup area that allows for decent defense. To dislodge the Islamic State when it itself is holding a town or city, like Mosul, will be more difficult.

Meanwhile a propaganda campaign in the U.S. media was launched to rehabilitate the Syrian president Bashar Assad. On January 19 the NYT propagandist Anna Barnard pointed to a (yet hardly observable) shift in the U.S. position towards the Syria war. On January 22 Leslie Gelb, Former chair of the influential Council of Foreign Relations, called for a deal with Assad. Gelb also pointed out that the Liberal Interventionists and Neocons in Obama's administration are still against cooperation with the Syrian establishment while the military seems to agree to such. Four days later a NYT editorial remarked on shifting realities in Syria:

[T]he greater threat now is not Mr. Assad but the Islamic State, especially if it continues to expand in Syria, entices more foreign fighters into its ranks and uses its territory to launch attacks on the West. A recent study by the RAND Corporation, which does research for the government, says the collapse of the Assad regime, while unlikely now, would be the “worst possible outcome” for American interests — depriving Syria of its remaining state institutions and creating more space for the Islamic State and other extremists to spread mayhem.

Yesterday Foreign Affairs, the magazine of the Council of Foreign Relations, published an interview with President Bashar Assad. In it Assad formal offers cooperation by the Syrian army with the U.S. air-force to defeat the Islamic State. He urges to put pressure on the Turkish government which allows the supplies and additional manpower for the Islamic State to cross its borders. Erdogan, Assad says, is "fanatical".

Interestingly I find nothing mentioned against Jordan and the U.S. puppet ruling it in the Assad interview. Jordan like Turkey supports Syrian insurgents including al-Qaeda in Syria in the form of Jabhat al-Nusra in their attacks in Syria. Does Assad believe that cooperating with the U.S. would take Jordan, and the southern campaign directed at Damascus, out of the game?

The southern campaign, also supported by Israel which Assad called al-Qaeda's air-force, announced a victory yesterday when it claimed to have taken out the Syrian's army brigade 82 in Sheik Miskin. Jabhat al-Nusra as well as the Fee Syrian army claimed to have won that battle. But it soon turned out that only the little defended brigade headquarter buildings were taken by them and that the brigade's fighting battalions and their weapons, stationed elsewhere, were not affected.

Comments to the various Assad rehabilitation pieces show that a lot of people in the "west" support cooperation with the Syrian government. The current spat between the White House and the Israeli premier Netanyahoo allow for a more lenient U.S. position toward Syria and helps push back Israeli wishes to destroy it. The fight in Kobani has shown that such cooperation with reliable boots on the ground is necessary and effective in defeating the Takfiris. The moment is right for a U.S. turn towards a reliable cooperation with Syria and with its president Bashar al-Assad.

Posted by b on January 27, 2015 at 9:59 UTC | Permalink

Comments