In the early morning hours of April 4, 2017, dozens of civilians were killed in a suspected chemical weapons attack in Khan Sheikhoun, a town in northwestern Syria held by rebel forces. The attacks were carried out by Assad’s air force.
The first meeting with Trump about what to do in response took place in the Oval Office. It was clear that this was a mass-murder attack by the Assad regime, but it wasn’t clear what weapons had been used, though accounts by eyewitnesses suggested that the planes had dropped a powerful nerve agent.
The CIA gathered more intelligence and also examined social media postings made after the attack. The French intelligence service also weighed in. The Trump administration concluded that Assad had used sarin, a nerve agent of the type that had been banned by international treaty for almost a century.
Trump was angered and upset by the attack, particularly when he watched images of children who were dying and were taking their last gasp of breath. Trump told staffers in the Oval Office that Assad was “a sick son of a bitch.” The president wondered aloud, “What do you do when you’ve got animals like this running a country?”
Trump blamed Obama for not enforcing his own “red line” on Assad’s use of chemical weapons five years earlier. Trump told the staffers, “I’m having to enforce ‘red lines’ he drew and then wouldn’t enforce himself.”
Trump met with his war cabinet in the White House Situation Room. Bannon was known to be a skeptic of military action, and Trump told him, “You got to speak up.”
Bannon said, “Look. First off, I don’t buy it. You got to show me much more evidence than this. Also, if this is our new standard—children being abused—let’s start in sub-Saharan Africa and work our way north. If we want to go do this, we can go do it all over the world. Guess what? The world’s a bad place. A lot of bad shit happens.”
The NSC developed a range of options for Trump. The “low end” option was diplomatic protests, but this relative inaction carried its own risks in the views of both Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and McMaster, who made the case that the Obama administration had been paralyzed by the risks of doing something in Syria but were at the same time blind to the risks of inaction.
Obama’s unenforced red line helped to explain why impressive veterans of America’s post-9/11 wars such as Mattis and McMaster were willing to work for Trump. They collectively felt that Obama had failed to manage the growing problems of the Middle East, epitomized by his not enforcing his own red line, and that the world was a less safe place as a result. In their view, Obama’s dithering over Syria was weakness that Putin took advantage of when he moved Russian forces into Syria in 2015 to prop up the Assad regime, secure in the knowledge that the Obama administration wouldn’t do much of anything to push back. Similarly, Iran had sent its forces into Syria to bolster Assad and was now the dominant regional player in the Middle East.
Now, McMaster emphasized to Trump the importance of deterring the future use of chemical weapons, saying, “This isn’t just about Syria. We’re on the hundredth anniversary of World War I. This hasn’t been used since then and if this becomes normalized, what happens? It’s a threat to all the civilized world.”
The “high end” option that the NSC prepared included attacks against targets associated with Assad himself as well as against Assad’s chemical warfare unit. McMaster, Tillerson, and Trump pushed for aggressive action against the Assad regime, but Mattis wanted to ensure that any attack didn’t inadvertently kill any of the Russian forces in Syria that were propping up the Assad regime. Mattis argued against military operations that would get the United States “pulled into a war.”
Derek Harvey, the retired colonel who oversaw the Middle East at the NSC, pushed for a consequential strike against Assad rather than just the pinprick of eliminating a fraction of Assad’s air force, which was one of the options on the table. Harvey advocated for taking out a larger target set of Assad’s air force and helicopter fleet as this would dramatically curtail the dictator’s ability to bomb his population at will.
Bannon confronted Harvey outside of the Situation Room and told the retired colonel, “We don’t want you fucking neocons starting a war.”
Mattis called McMaster, scolding him, “You let this get too far down the road.”
McMaster spoke with Reince Priebus, Trump’s chief of staff, about the timing of the strikes, the optimal moment for which in McMaster’s view happened to be soon after Trump arrived at Mar-a-Lago, where he was hosting a long-planned summit with Chinese president Xi Jinping. Soon after Trump touched down in Florida on April 6, the president along with Kushner, Mattis, McMaster, and Priebus all entered into a dark blue tent that was pitched inside one of the rooms in the palatial Mar-a-Lago building. The ultrasecure tent had noise-making devices and opaque sides to prevent anyone eavesdropping on what was happening inside. The tent was connected to the White House Situation Room on an encrypted video line.
In the tent, Trump and his national security team talked over the options on the table, joined remotely by the officials in the Situation Room. After hearing the options, Trump said, “Okay, I’ll let you know in a few minutes.”
Trump selected the strike option that would take out about a fifth of Assad’s air force. This had two goals: to restore deterrence against the use of chemical weapons and also to diminish the Syrian regime’s capacity to launch more chemical weapons attacks from the air.
Trump told Mattis, “Do it, General.”
Mattis went to his room, where there was a mobile SCIF set up, a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, a secure facility that was hardened against electronic surveillance. From the SCIF, Mattis oversaw the operation in Syria as it unfolded half a world away.
At 5:30 pm, Mattis called CENTCOM, ordering, “Go ahead: option one. Execute.”
Because the Russians had tens of thousands of servicemen in Syria propping up Assad’s regime, CENTCOM sent them a warning about the strike that was about to take place at the Shayrat Airbase, which was where the Syrian planes that had carried the chemical weapons for the April 4 attack had taken off.
As the fifty-nine cruise missiles targeting the Syrian airbase “spun up” in their tubes, Trump and his team went to the formal welcome dinner for Xi. At one point an aide handed a note to McMaster that read, “The strikes occurred.” McMaster walked to Trump and gave him the note. As Xi was eating a piece of chocolate cake, Trump leaned over to him and told him about the strikes.
There was some concern that the Russians might use their sophisticated surface-to-air S-300 missiles that they had deployed in Syria, but they didn’t. The Syrians did deploy their own air defenses, which consisted of older Russian missile systems, but they were entirely ineffectual.
Afterward, in a distant echo of the famous photo of President Obama and his national security team watching the US Navy SEAL operation that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011, a photograph was taken of Trump and his national security team as they listened to an after-action report about the effects of the strikes in Syria. The reports were that all the targets were hit. The mood in the room was sober.
Trump’s announcement that he had ordered the cruise missile attacks in Syria was one of his best speeches. Visibly moved, Trump said, “My fellow Americans, on Tuesday, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad launched a horrible chemical weapons attack on innocent civilians. Using a deadly nerve agent, Assad choked out the lives of helpless men, women, and children. It was a slow and brutal death for so many. Even beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack. No child of God should ever suffer such horror. Tonight, I ordered a targeted military strike on the airfield in Syria from where the chemical attack was launched. It is in this vital national security interest of the United States to prevent and deter the spread and use of deadly chemical weapons. There can be no dispute that Syria used banned chemical weapons, violated its obligations under the Chemical Weapons Convention, and ignored the urging of the U.N. Security Council. Years of previous attempts at changing Assad’s behavior have all failed, and failed very dramatically. As a result, the refugee crisis continues to deepen and the region continues to destabilize, threatening the United States and its allies. Tonight, I call on all civilized nations to join us in seeking to end the slaughter and bloodshed in Syria.”
Even his critics showered Trump with praise for the strikes. Fareed Zakaria, the CNN host who frequently took Trump to task, gave him a rousing endorsement, saying, “I think Donald Trump became president of the United States. . . . For the first time really as president, he talked about international norms, international rules, about America’s role in enforcing justice in the world. It was the kind of rhetoric that we have come to expect from American presidents since Harry Truman.”
It was the brutality that Assad had unleashed against his own citizens, symbolized by his use of nerve agents against them, that had played a key role in the rise of ISIS. Al-Qaeda in Iraq had largely been defeated by 2010, but it lingered on in a vestigial form, and after Assad started violently attacking Arab Spring protesters in 2011, members of the Sunni militant group slipped from Iraq into Syria to fight Assad’s brutal rule.
Assad emptied his prisons of jihadists in order to justify his war against his own people as a war against supposed “terrorists.” Over time, this became a self-fulfilling prophecy as the released prisoners then joined Sunni armed groups. Eventually Al-Qaeda in Iraq morphed into ISIS, which was essentially a marriage of convenience between Iraqi Baathist military officers and militant jihadists burning with zeal to oust Assad and what they saw as a “Shia” government in Baghdad. By 2014, ISIS was a terrorist army that had formed its own quasi state across great swaths of Syria and Iraq.
On the campaign trail, Trump said that within thirty days of taking office he would task the generals fighting ISIS to come up with a new plan to defeat the group. During the campaign, Trump also suggested that he would fire the generals who were then leading the campaign against ISIS.
If that were the case, the first to go would have been General Joseph Votel, who had led the ISIS fight as the commander of CENTCOM since early 2016. Votel had previously commanded JSOC, Joint Special Operations Command, the umbrella group for all US special operations forces, including the SEAL team unit that had killed bin Laden. Votel, a lanky six foot two, whose black glasses and earnest demeanor gave him the look of a very fit Clark Kent, had also spent more than a decade fighting ISIS and its precursor groups such as Al-Qaeda in Iraq, and he well understood what was needed to defeat them.
As CENTCOM commander, Votel was effectively the American proconsul in the Middle East, flying across the region in his modified C-17 with his political adviser, who was a senior diplomat, and a bevy of colonels who kept him on schedule. On his C-17, which was the size of a large passenger jet, Votel worked and slept inside an Airstream trailer that was bolted to the floor of the plane; it was specially modified so that he could stay in touch with his commanders spread out over the twenty countries in the Middle East and Central Asia, his area of operations, as well as his headquarters in Tampa. When working in his small but comfortable cabin, Votel could be found hunched over a couple of classified computers monitoring the war against ISIS.
When ISIS started seizing large chunks of territory in Iraq during the first half of 2014, initially the Obama administration dithered. There was a debate at the White House about whether to carry out airstrikes to support the Iraqi army. The debate went on for many weeks until ISIS fighters surrounded ten thousand Yazidi civilians on a mountain in western Iraq. It was the height of summer and ISIS’s genocidal fanatics now seemed poised to wipe out the Yazidis, a religious sect that ISIS deemed to be infidels. Obama authorized CENTCOM to carry out airstrikes to prevent the massacre of the Yazidis. In retaliation, the terrorist group murdered the American journalist James Foley, which galvanized the Obama administration to ramp up the fight against ISIS.
The Votel-led campaign against ISIS resulted in the deaths of many ISIS leaders in Iraq and Syria and also of tens of thousands of ISIS fighters. A critical ally in Votel’s campaign against ISIS was Iraqi lieutenant general Abdul-Wahab al-Saadi, who was virtually unknown outside Iraq but was a hero in his own country. When the three-star general walked into the lobby of a guesthouse in Baghdad in late 2017, well-wishers who wanted to take selfies with him quickly surrounded him. Saadi, a tall, thin man with deep, dark circles under his eyes that were a testament to his long years of fighting against ISIS, was a key to the campaign that defeated ISIS. It was his storied Golden Division of Iraq’s Counter-Terrorism Service, the Iraqi version of US special operations forces, which did much of the fighting and dying to defeat ISIS.
Indeed, Iraq’s US-trained Counter-Terrorism Service and its elite Golden Division played a key role in the defeat of ISIS, while the wider Iraqi army ignominiously fled from the ISIS militants who seized much of Iraq in 2014. Saadi explained why that was, “We have zero tolerance for sectarianism.” Iraq’s minority Sunni population had long viewed the Iraqi security services as one big armed Shia group with a deeply sectarian agenda. The Counter-Terrorism Service, which consisted of about ten thousand soldiers, also demanded continuous training for its soldiers, unlike the Iraqi army, which required only basic training. The prestige of the CTS could be gauged by the fact that when the Iraqi government launched a recruitment drive in May 2017, three hundred thousand men applied to be part of the force. Only around one thousand would end up being accepted into training at a joint US-Iraqi facility.
Saadi said American logistical and intelligence support and US airpower accounted for “fifty percent of the success of the battle” against ISIS. American bombs inflicted heavy casualties on ISIS and were a morale booster for Saadi’s troops. Another important factor was the training of the CTS by US special forces. It was arguably one of the most successful training missions that the US has ever conducted.
Saadi led the Golden Division into battle in key phases of the war against ISIS, liberating first Iraq’s key oil refineries in Baiji in June 2015 and then significant Iraqi cities such as Fallujah, Ramadi, and Tikrit. It was, above all, his role in the fight for Mosul that cemented Saadi’s reputation among Iraqis. The fight for Mosul was never going to be easy. The second largest city in Iraq, the old section of the city in western Mosul was a warren of narrow medieval-era streets and buildings. The battle for Mosul lasted nine months—in part, Saadi said, because Iraqi forces didn’t want to level the city: “We were very careful to preserve the infrastructure and also the lives of innocents remaining in the city.”
The fight in Mosul was also complicated because ISIS deployed more than one thousand VBIEDs—vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices—cars and trucks driven by suicide bombers. These VBIEDs were greatly feared by the Golden Division troops. Also, many of ISIS’s most competent fighters, numbering around ten thousand, decided to make their last stand in Mosul where ISIS’s self-styled caliphate was first proclaimed in 2014 by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the elusive leader of ISIS. Mosul finally fell to Iraqi forces in July 2017. Five months later, the Iraqi military released a statement saying Iraq was “fully liberated” from ISIS’s reign of terror. Three years earlier, ISIS had controlled 40 percent of the country.
In the waning months of the Obama administration, as the US-backed Iraqi forces moved closer to wresting control of Mosul from ISIS, Votel was already deep in the planning for striking the heart of the terrorist group’s “caliphate,” the Syrian city of Raqqa.
Votel, a native of Minnesota and a big Vikings fan, explained, “The importance of Raqqa is that is where ISIS plans their external [terrorist] operations. That is what is driving us to get on this as quick as we can, because this is where the plotting takes place. That doesn’t mean we necessarily know that there is a specific plot we are trying to disrupt now or in a couple of weeks, but Raqqa is recognized as the financial, leadership and external ops center of the Islamic State.”
Both Mosul and Raqqa were the major objectives in the American military strategy to defeat ISIS’s terrorist army in the Middle East. Rather than committing substantial land forces, the Obama administration and later the Trump administration provided special forces, intelligence resources, and airpower to Iraqi and Syrian fighters on the ground. The last time the United States had used this approach in a substantial manner was a decade and a half earlier in Afghanistan, where a similar combination of US special forces working with their Afghan allies on the ground combined with large-scale American airpower led to the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan in the months after 9/11.
Mattis told Trump, “If you want to take down the physical caliphate, we have to take down the physical caliphate. There will be a lot of destruction. And there will be civilian casualties.” Trump and Mattis agreed that the goal was not to “defeat” ISIS as it was under Obama, but to “annihilate” the terrorist army. This was something of a distinction without a difference, since defeating ISIS would surely entail destroying it. Nor was “annihilate” a conventional military doctrinal term, but the Pentagon certainly got the point that Trump wanted to destroy ISIS’s caliphate as soon as feasible.
Ten days before Trump’s inauguration, Brett McGurk, who oversaw the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, and his deputy, retired lieutenant general Terry Wolff, went to the Trump transition headquarters in Washington to meet with Mike Flynn and Keith Kellogg, also both retired lieutenant generals, and Tom Bossert, Trump’s homeland security adviser. Using a couple of maps as aids to describe where ISIS was positioned in Iraq and Syria, McGurk and Wolff explained, “There is an opportunity for Team Trump in the first six months or so. You guys can speed this up a little bit if you are willing to allow everyone to do things a little faster, without coming back and asking ‘Mother, may I?’ all the time.” McGurk and Wolff laid out a plan that would speed up the tempo of operations against ISIS. The trio of top Trump national security advisers was enthusiastic.
A week after he was inaugurated, Trump issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 3, which mandated an updated campaign plan against ISIS within thirty days. The new plan was largely the Obama plan to defeat ISIS, but it focused on a faster tempo of operations and devolved the authority to conduct operations down to the combatant commands, which in this case was CENTCOM commander General Votel, who no longer needed to check in with the White House when he was launching operations.
Two weeks after his inauguration, on February 6, 2017, Trump visited CENTCOM headquarters at the MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), which supported the largely special operations forces–led fight against ISIS, also had its headquarters at MacDill. Trump was there to be briefed about the fight against ISIS as well as the war in Afghanistan. At CENTCOM, General Votel and the SOCOM commander, General Raymond “Tony” Thomas, gave Trump and some of his top national security officials—including his as-yet-to-be-fired national security adviser, Mike Flynn—a high-level, one-hour briefing about US military operations in the greater Middle East using a large map of the region.
To emphasize the strategic importance of the region, Votel pointed to the Strait of Hormuz between Oman and Iran, the key choke point for oil coming out of the Middle East. A third of the world’s sea-borne oil transited the Strait of Hormuz.
Trump told the generals, “The next time Iran sends its boats into the Strait blow them out of the water! Let’s get Mad Dog on this.”
The generals let that one slide. CENTCOM was not about to launch a preemptive strike against Iran without a direct legal order from the commander in chief.
About ten minutes into the briefing, Trump asked the generals, “Shouldn’t we have taken the oil when we were in Iraq the last time?”
Trump believed that Iraq’s oil should have been used to compensate the United States for the money it had spent invading and occupying the country.
The generals also let that one slide, as plundering another country’s resources was a crime under international law. It would have also played into the common conspiracy theory that the United States had invaded Iraq in 2003 “for the oil.” Also, the Iraqis hadn’t exactly asked for the American invasion of their country that had precipitated a brutal civil war that had lasted in one form or another for the past decade and a half.
There tended to be very little difference between what Trump said in public and what Trump said in private when it came to his key obsessions, and the missed opportunity to seize Iraq’s oil was one of them. It would be a common refrain.
The Trump administration made a substantial shift in the fight against ISIS in Syria. The Obama administration was so concerned about “mission creep” in Syria that it had put tight limits on what US commanders could do there. One limit was that there could be only three American helicopters in Syria at any given moment. This severely constrained the Pentagon’s ability to support the Syrian forces fighting ISIS. McMaster removed this restriction. The Obama administration had also capped the number of US soldiers in Syria at five hundred special forces trainers.
In the waning months of Obama’s second term, his war cabinet had debated about whether to arm the Kurds in northern Syria with light weapons. The Kurds would be key to taking Raqqa back from ISIS, but arming them, even only with light weaponry, would anger neighboring Turkey, with its large and sometimes restive Kurdish minority. It was the least bad option on the table, however, since without an effective ground force there was no way to retake a city the size of Raqqa from ISIS. Obama’s national security team also debated whether to employ Apache attack helicopters in Syria to support the relatively small number of American troops there.
The Obama team debated these options for so long that it eventually ran out of time to implement them. Three days before he left office, on January 17, 2017, Obama directed that the plans be given to the Trump team, so they could make their own decisions. (President George W. Bush had done something similar when he left office at the end of his second term: his war cabinet had developed plans for a surge of troops into Afghanistan, but he left the decision about its implementation to President Obama.)
In May 2017, Trump approved a plan to arm the tens of thousands of Kurdish forces fighting ISIS in Syria with rifles, machine guns, and lightweight mortars. The Trump plan also lifted Obama-era caps on the size of the US military presence. During Trump’s first two years in office, American forces in Syria would rise to two thousand troops.
At the same time that the Trump administration was ramping up the fight against ISIS, it also deftly defused an ISIS plot to slip hard-to-detect bombs disguised in laptops onto flights bound for the United States, bombs that would then be detonated personally by the terrorists on those flights. Israeli government hackers had learned of ISIS’s plans when they had hacked into a cell of ISIS bomb makers in Syria. Israeli spies then passed on this intelligence to their American counterparts.
In March, the Department of Homeland Security announced that eight Middle Eastern and African countries that had direct flights to the States could not allow passengers to carry on electronic devices larger than a cell phone. DHS also announced enhanced security measures at all 208 airports around the world that had direct flights into the States, including greater scrutiny of electronic devices and the use of more bomb-sniffing dogs. In late July, the laptop ban was lifted following the implementation of enhanced security procedures at airports in the eight affected countries.
On October 20, 2017, US-backed forces announced that Raqqa was liberated from ISIS. No American soldiers were killed during the liberation of Raqqa. As Raqqa was falling, President Trump took a victory lap during an interview, claiming that ISIS hadn’t been defeated earlier because “you didn’t have Trump as your president.”
Was this claim true? Yes and no. In August 2016, Lieutenant General Sean MacFarland, who was the ground commander for the fight against ISIS, said the US-led coalition had killed an estimated forty-five thousand ISIS fighters. About a year later, at the Aspen Security Forum in July 2017, the commander of Special Operations Command, General Raymond “Tony” Thomas, said that an estimated sixty thousand to seventy thousand ISIS fighters had been killed since the campaign against the terror group began. According to these senior US military officials, by the summer of 2017 the bulk of ISIS fighters had been killed during the pre-Trump period.
This wasn’t surprising since the campaign to eradicate ISIS first began two and a half years before Trump assumed office, when Obama had ordered ISIS positions to be bombed during the summer of 2014. The operation to take back Mosul, the second-largest city in Iraq where ISIS had first declared its “caliphate,” began in October 2016 while Obama was still in office, and was long planned. Under Obama, ISIS also lost significant Iraqi cities such as Fallujah, Ramadi, and Tikrit.
Saadi, the Iraqi special forces commander, seemed genuinely puzzled when asked if he had noticed any changes in American support during the more than two years that he had led the Iraqi fight against ISIS. Saadi said, “There was no difference between the support given by Obama and Trump.”
There was certainly considerable continuity between the Obama plan against ISIS and the Trump plan in Iraq, but Trump did push down to his military commanders the authorities for taking action against ISIS so that they were no longer micromanaged by the White House, as was often the case under Obama. Also, the Trump administration did away with the self-imposed limits that the Obama team had put on military action in Syria.
So Trump could certainly take credit for hastening the demise of ISIS’s geographical “caliphate,” but ultimately both presidents approached the ISIS problem in the same essential way. First, they didn’t commit large numbers of American boots on the ground in either Iraq or Syria. Second, using US special forces as trainers and advisers, they operated “by, with, and through” local forces. In Iraq, those forces were the Counter-Terrorism Service and its elite Golden Division, while in Syria it was the largely Kurdish fighters of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). American fighters and helicopters provided significant air support to both of these local ground forces. During the five-year campaign against ISIS that began in 2014, the largely Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces lost eleven thousand soldiers, while seventeen American servicemen were killed in Iraq and Syria.
Trump tended to define any course of action that he took as being markedly different from Obama, but in the case of the anti-ISIS campaign, there were more similarities than differences between the two presidents’ approaches.
ISIS once attracted an estimated forty thousand militants from around the world eager to join its so-called caliphate in Syria and Iraq. The Obama and Trump campaigns against ISIS pushed that number close to zero. No one wanted to join the losing team.
The geographical defeat of ISIS in Iraq and Syria did not end the influence of ISIS, however. In a January 2019 report to Congress, the director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, wrote that “ISIS still commands thousands of fighters in Iraq and Syria, and it maintains eight branches, more than a dozen networks, and thousands of dispersed supporters around the world, despite significant leadership and territorial losses.”
Three months after Coats’s report was published, a Sri Lankan jihadist group inspired by ISIS carried out multiple suicide bombings across the country in churches packed with worshippers who were celebrating Easter Sunday. They also attacked luxury hotels frequented by foreigners, killing at least 250 people. It was one of the most lethal terrorist attacks since 9/11. Any reports of ISIS’s demise were premature.