Jun 1, 2018

Nine months after US troops helped liberate the Islamic State’s former capital of Raqqa, the city's lethal mound of unexploded ordnance is challenging the Donald Trump administration’s hopes for a quick exit out of Syria.

The State Department has trumpeted the Raqqa effort as an opportunity to empower local partners to begin conducting a yearslong cleanup on their own. But as Trump publicly seeks to draw down the 2,000 US troops in the war-torn country, some demining experts worry the rehabilitation effort won’t be able to get Syrian trainees up to speed to clean up the booby traps, car bombs and mines left behind by the retreating jihadis.

Officially liberated last September by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, Raqqa is home to a small contingent of advisers hired by the California-based company Tetra Tech. The firm has begun training locals to remove explosives, but some doubt how much those experts are doing to fix the rubble-laden city.

“There’s a question of how much clearance they’re doing, or whether they’re hanging out and doing some mentoring,” said Brian Castner, a senior crisis adviser at Amnesty International who served three tours as an Air Force ordnance disposal officer in Iraq. “Raqqa is the wrong place to be learning. That’s not a learning environment, that’s an operating at the top of your game environment.”

But US officials indicate that the demining effort is needed to clear critical sites before infrastructure can get up and running again. Speaking at a State Department press conference in December, Stan Brown, the director of the agency’s Office of Weapons Removal and Abatement, said that contractors had trained 120 locals in Raqqa in some elements of demining. “They’re clearing critical infrastructure to enable the follow-on humanitarian assistance to flow into the area to provide a level of stabilization so civil society can come back up and begin to run normally again,” he said.