Politics on the Front Lines
WES BRYANT
WITH REMARKS FROM DANA PITTARD
In Mar’a, our NSF held a very weak line.
The dimensions of the line were ever in flux, with ISIS continually taking villages and cities west of the line and our opposition forces eventually taking them back with support from our Special Forces advisors and our airstrikes.
We routinely decimated ISIS positions up and down the Mar’a Line to enable our surrogate Syrian fighters to take back towns and cities. But, time and again, ISIS would just move back in a day or two later when we weren’t watching and kill any opposition forces still holding there or force their retreat.
The operating environment in Syria was incredibly different than what I had experienced in Iraq a year before. As opposed to the large, relatively well-equipped ground forces of the Iraqis, in Syria we were running hastily-trained units that fought in squad-sized elements at the most (six to twelve men). In addition, our NSF were a surrogate force composed partly of fighters who had no previous military background. Many did not have the years of experience fighting an insurgency behind them that our Iraqi forces did.
A lot of the Syrian recruits were previously educated professionals—doctors, lawyers, teachers, skilled workers, and even college students. These were people who’d had no thoughts or inclinations to join a military effort before the civil war. Topping it off, our NSF were pitted against a highly-trained, well-equipped, and extremely experienced fighting force that, by then, was not operating nearly as overtly as it had been a year previous when the campaign against ISIS began. After enduring months of the coalition airstrike campaign in Iraq and Syria, ISIS had learned something about how to mask movements from us. Targeting had become far more difficult.
To complicate matters more, different government entities ran surrogate forces in the region; entities that we had to coordinate with before striking and from whom we also gained intelligence. These different government entities also ran surrogate forces that we occasionally supported with airstrikes against ISIS. We had special operations liaisons embedded with those agencies, but it upped the ante considerably for the level of coordination needed before we cleared any strikes. On any given mission, we’d often have to coordinate with three or four separate ground entities running their respective militia forces in order to meet conditions for a safe and vetted strike. To complicate matters more, sometimes reports from the various entities would contradict. So, the sifting and vetting of information needed in order to get to the point of actually striking was exponentially more tedious than it even had been in Iraq.
Undermanned and Underequipped
Some of the worst struggles we had in our mission in Syria were essentially self-inflicted. Well, at least by higher leadership. At various junctures during the mission, there were constraints imposed by Washington directing us to cease resupplying and reinforcing our surrogate forces.1 That had drastic effects on our mission and our forward Syrian forces fighting ISIS.
On the frontlines in Syria, our NSF fighters found themselves continually in the cold because of the stalls in our task force’s authorizations to reinforce and resupply them as promised. We often had situations in which a small number of our supported Syrian fighters became overwhelmed on an ISIS-infested battlefield with no hope for resupply from us (as promised) and no trained reinforcements on the way.2
The Syrians we’d recruited to fight ISIS had chosen the side of democracy and freedom. They were patriotic Syrians who’d joined our cause to fight a common enemy and take back their country. America gave them the hope and promise that we would help them. We owed them what we promised. But the ever-changing political climate in Washington and shifting directives from the Pentagon constantly prevented us from fulfilling those promises. It enraged us all that so often we simply could not deliver.
Our trouble was compounded in September.
We’d had a newly trained NSF force standing by in Turkey for weeks. We’d been waiting on approval from Washington to push them into Syria to reinforce the fight on the Mar’a Line. Along with more fighters they’d bring in more gun trucks, weapons, and ammunition sorely needed to resupply their NSF brothers on the line. On the Mar’a Line a small unit of NSF had been holding a highly contested town south of Mar’a for days. The NSF fighters were down to one rifle magazine of ammunition per man.
Authorization to push our NSF into Syria had to come directly from President Obama. His delays in approval were tied to a political climate in Washington that reeked of confusion and indecision toward both the NSF program and the general intent of our mission in Syria in the first place. Eventually, the president finally authorized the insertion.
On the night of the infill, our strike cell was tasked with covering the NSF movement across the Turkish-Syrian border, at an insertion point that happened to be in territory owned by another, unfriendly militia force. As it turned out, the commander of our new NSF team, and most of its members, were from a tribal faction that was the historic enemy of the force holding ground on the Syrian side of our intended border crossing.
As soon as the NSF tried to cross into Syria, they were denied entry at gunpoint by the armed force of rival militia fighters. The commander of the militia force on the Syrian side maintained that his fighters would open fire on our NSF team if they refused to go back into Turkey.
When we got word about the threat, our task force commander directed us to posture our drones to be ready to kill any militia fighters on the Syrian side of the border if they opened fire on our NSF. It was an incredibly ironic turn because, on any other night, we would have been supporting the same militia fighters with airstrikes against ISIS. On that night we had an armed MQ-9 Reaper overhead ready to bury its Hellfire missiles into all of them.
Luckily, the situation resolved after a couple of hours. The NSF commander and the leader of the militia force at the border checkpoint came to an agreement. The new team inserted along with their vital resupply of vehicles, ammunition, and equipment.
Then, as if the mission couldn’t have gotten worse, the next day we heard reports that fighters from the famed al-Nusra Front had been handed some of the gun trucks, M-4 rifles, and a large portion of the ammunition we’d sent in with our new NSF unit. Somehow that news got out to mainstream media. Soon enough it was reported that our U.S.-backed Syrian fighters had betrayed us.
That couldn’t have been further from the truth. Unbeknownst to us at the time, our small band of NSF fighters had been stopped at an al-Nusra Front checkpoint while on their way to Mar’a, hours after we’d gotten them safely through the border checkpoint and had stopped overwatching their movement—assuming they were safe in friendly territory (we only had so many assets and we couldn’t be everywhere at once). Outnumbered and outmatched by the al-Nusra fighters, the NSF were forced to give up some of their weapons and ammunition in exchange for their lives and safe passage.3 That misinformation would only convolute the political perceptions toward our mission even more.
A Lost Objective
Our task force also had the mission of monitoring the desolate desert wastelands in southeast Syria where ISIS continued to maintain ground. There at the infamous Tri-Border region where Iraq, Syria, and Jordan meet, we watched for months as ISIS held several cities and border crossings between Iraq and Syria.
We began hunting for groups of armed ISIS fighters in the Tri-Border region after we’d gained intelligence that ISIS held the major border city of Al Tanf, Syria as a stronghold. We learned that ISIS was moving freely between Iraq and Syria through the Al Tanf border crossing and resupplying fighters at the front in Iraq. We soaked the area for days with our drones, and eventually tracked a small group of armed fighters after they’d held a meeting in Al Tanf and then loaded a pick-up truck to head east across the Iraq border.
Our strike cell coordinated a set of F-16s to drop a 500-pound GBU-54 on the truck of six ISIS fighters as it traveled east. The bomb was the best in U.S. inventory for hitting fast-moving vehicles, but unfortunately it didn’t hit its intended aim point at the center of the cab and impacted slightly off the truck. The blast threw the truck into the air and killed the fighters in the cab, but the ones sitting in the bed of the truck were thrown out. Two survived. They were injured, and trying in earnest to get to their feet and scramble away from the vehicle.
Our strike cell director was a smart and aggressive Special Forces major who I enjoyed working with. He ordered the Army JTACs on shift to re-attack the surviving ISIS fighters with another strike. But the task force lawyer, who’d been quietly observing from behind, chimed in. He insisted it would be a war crime to prosecute another attack because the enemy was “clearly wounded” and “trying to flee.”
Out of caution, the director called off the strike. Furious, our JTACs were powerless to affect the decision of the task force lawyer. They reluctantly watched as the ISIS fighters lived to fight another day. The two ISIS fighters regrouped and fled further east to take safe-haven at the next border town in Iraq.
Within a day after that strike, we received intelligence that one of the surviving fighters was a high-profile ISIS leader—one of the “named objectives” we’d been after for quite some time. Unfortunately, our lawyer’s call that day had inadvertently allowed a senior ISIS leader to live. That would make the ISIS commander a hero in the eyes of his men.
After much heated discussion in the days following, including some phones calls to higher headquarters lawyers, our JTAC team proved that the task force lawyer had been wrong on his call. The rules of engagement actually authorized us to strike maneuvering enemy personnel, to include those “fleeing or exfiltrating from a previous attack.”
The lawyer—though obviously well-intentioned—had made a call based on a subjective interpretation of the rules of engagement that truly stemmed from a general culture of apprehension, rooted in a political climate of wavering support for the mission in Syria combined with an enduring fear of public perception toward America’s airstrike campaigns. It was a culture pervasive throughout America’s war on terror, and it reared its head quite often.
A Massacre in Paris
ISIS had complete freedom of maneuver at the Tri-border region for months. We could have smashed identified ISIS strongholds with airstrikes a lot earlier on, but we weren’t given the go ahead to target any of them. We lacked approval from Washington to actually push NSF teams into the region, and any offensive operations to take out entire ISIS compounds or fortifications had to be tied to our NSF ground offensives. The NSF themselves had to take back ground—only with our assistance.
We had another newly-trained NSF unit on hold. They’d been sitting and waiting for weeks to enter southeast Syria and push ISIS out of their strongholds in Al Tanf. Time and again we had them staged and ready to go across the Syrian border, only to get word that the mission was on hold because Washington had reneged on approval.
Our Special Forces teams handling the NSF were faced with the challenge of keeping an understandably angry Syrian militia force from abandoning the NSF program altogether—along with their alignment to our cause. Most of the fighters were on the verge of quitting. If we weren’t going to help them fight ISIS, they were going back to Syria to protect their families. No one blamed them for that. We weren’t coming through on our promises.
On Friday, November 13, we had the NSF unit staged for what we thought would be final approval to push them across and oust the ISIS strongpoints in Al Tanf for good. We waited anxiously all night for approval from President Obama. We had strike aircraft postured for the mission.
Approval never came.
That same night in France, an ISIS-coordinated suicide attack at six different locations around Paris took the lives of at least 130 innocent people.4 It was a terrorist-prosecuted massacre unlike anything the modern world had ever seen. President Obama became so engrossed with the political and diplomatic emergency of that event that the approval we’d been waiting for on our end wasn’t going to happen.
On one hand we understood completely. But on the other we thought: what better thing to do in response than push our guys across the Syrian border and annihilate ISIS in their strongholds that night? Man, how I wished I could have called President Obama to tell him as much. And I surely would have if ever given the chance.
On November 15 we finally gained the president’s approval. Our Special Forces team infilled the NSF into southeast Syria and together we decimated the mass of ISIS strongholds with airstrikes from an AC-130W gunship and mortar fire from our NSF team on the ground.
Meanwhile, French fighter jets executed a separate bombing mission in the Ar Raqqah region of Syria in retaliation against ISIS for the Paris Massacre.5
The next day, I caught on the news that Senator John McCain had asked a pointed question in reference to the French retaliatory airstrikes along the lines of “if we’d had all of these ISIS targets just sitting there, why had we not already struck them?”
It was a valid question.
Often, higher headquarters would mandate sitting on vetted targets for a while in order to tie the strikes into a ground offensive or particular agenda, like we had just done with the strikes in Al Tanf. Other times, they’d request to further develop targets by watching them for longer periods—tracking activity around them to gain more information that could lead to additional or more lucrative targets.
The targets the French attacked had already been approved as vetted targets, but they were being sat on for one of those reasons. Because the Paris Massacre was such a huge and significant event, those vetted targets were handed over to the French to strike immediately as retribution against ISIS.
We did that to help conciliate our allies. They wanted blood-for-blood just like the rest of us, it was only natural. But as a warfighter I had to side with Senator McCain’s sentiments—I saw no use for political pretenses.
Remarks from Dana Pittard
Back in 2013 when I’d heard the initial proposal for the New Syrian Forces pitched by the highly respected Major General Mike Nagata, my gut reaction was that it was a bad idea and would be doomed to failure. I certainly appreciated the concept of using Syrian fighters as a surrogate force against ISIS. However, my experience as the senior U.S. military leader in Jordan gave me a different view of any potential NSF training program.
I’d had lengthy discussions with our personnel who were then responsible for conducting the training and support of the moderate Free Syrian Army (FSA) fighters.6 The small, limited program was effective. However, they could barely find enough fighters who would voluntarily leave Syria to train in Turkey and elsewhere. Although there were tens of thousands of military-aged Syrian males in refugee camps in Jordan, very few of them were interested in going back to Syria to fight. Understandably, they were trying to escape the bloodshed in Syria and take care of their families.
The NSF concept was rife with potential problems from the start. There were not enough recruits available, and the inevitably small units would have little effect against ISIS. In addition, most recruits were more interested in fighting the Syrian regime than ISIS. Then there was a major question that was never fully answered: How would we support them when they got into a fight with Syrian Army units?
Even with my reservations, I’d had faith that if anyone could pull the NSF program together it was the extremely talented and politically savvy Major General Nagata. Mike Nagata briefed congressmen, inter-agencies, and national leaders in the Middle East region on the NSF program. It had certainly briefed well but, unfortunately, in the end it just did not work out.7
1 Greg Miller and Karen DeYoung, “Secret CIA effort in Syria faces large funding cut,” The Washington Post, June 12, 2015, accessed September 14, 2108.
2 Jeffrey White, “The New Syrian Force: Down but Not Necessarily Out,” The Washington Institute, August 11, 2015, accessed September 14, 2018, https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/the-new-syrian-force-down-but-not-necessarily-out.
3 Yeganeh Torbati, “U.S.-trained Syrian rebels gave equipment to Nusra: U.S. Military,” Reuters, September 26, 2015, accessed April 24, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-usa-equipment/u-s-trained-syrian-rebels-gave-equipment-to-nusra-u-s-military-idUSKCN0RP2HO201 509 26.
4 “Three Hours of Terror in Paris, Moment by Moment,” The New York Times, November 13, 2015, accessed April 24, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/11/13/world/europe/paris-shooting-attacks.html.
5 Alissa J. Rubin and Anne Barnard, “France Strikes ISIS Targets in Syria in Retaliation for Attacks,” The New York Times, November 15, 2015, accessed April 24, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/16/world/europe/paris-terror-attack.html.
6 Agence France Presse, “REPORT: The CIA Has Been Secretly Training Syrian Rebels For Months,” Business Insider, June 21, 2013, accessed September 14, 2018, https://www.businessinsider.com/cia-secret-training-syrian-rebels-2013-6.
7 Seifu Al Midhadi, “The ‘New Syrian Forces’: A Failed U.S. Initiative,” The Middle East Magazine Online, August 05, 2015, accessed April 24, 2018, http://www.themiddleeastmagazine.com/?p=5485.