Jun 17, 2019

Congress wants to give the Pentagon more freedom to help US-backed forces in Syria detain Islamic State fighters in the war-torn country.

The Senate version of the National Defense Authorization Act released last week expands an authority the Pentagon can use to build small-scale temporary facilities such as ammunition and resupply points in Syria to also support the detention of Islamic State (IS, also known as ISIS) fighters. The new bill calls for expanding previous assistance to the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) to also cover the “temporary detention and repatriation” of foreign fighters “in accordance with” international law.

For months, the Donald Trump administration has called on European allies to play a bigger role in dealing with captured foreign fighters in Syria and Iraq. But some experts worry that the move could create false hope among the SDF, which faces a threat from Turkey and protests from Arabs in northeast Syria, as the Pentagon’s support has remained flat over the past two years.

“They have kind of fed off of whatever scraps of promises and resources that we’ve thrown them,” said Elizabeth Dent, a former adviser for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS and now a nonresident fellow with the Middle East Institute. “When we basically satisfy a small portion of what they’ve asked for, it gives them hope that we’re a reliable partner even though we haven’t delivered on 10,000 other things they’ve asked for.”

The construction authority first came about after the Barack Obama administration demanded the ability to build temporary supply points and assembly areas, for a maximum of $4 million per project and $12 million per year. The Trump administration extended the authority to deepen the fight against IS in its onetime capital of Raqqa during the height of the fighting in 2017, Al-Monitor reported at the time.