Trump and Raqqa

The fall of Raqqa, the putative capital of the caliphate declared by ISIS within the territory they held for more than three years, is a vitally positive development in the global struggle against violent jihadism. Unfortunately, as has become unavoidable in the current climate, what should  be a consensual moment has become politicized and polarizing here in the US. President Donald Trump was quick to use the occasion to claim credit for himself and heap opprobrium on his predecessor, declaring that Raqqa had not fallen until now “Because you didn’t have Trump as your president." Such assertions have fueled a debate (one that might have ensued in any case, given the hyperpartisan moment) about whether Trump fairly deserves credit for this victory.

Superficially the basic question of whether Trump deserves credit for Raqqa's fall is moot. He is the President and the Commander-in-Chief, thus even though the contention of his critics that he simply followed the plan of the Obama White House to completion has real merit, on the principle of "first do no harm" Trump deserves credit for having avoided disrupting the operation in any of many ways that were possible during a transition of leadership. Raqqa fell on his watch, and thus some part of the credit for this achievement is inalienably his.

Though superficially it invites simple answers, for the question of what role the Trump White House may have played in the fall of Raqqa to have any real strategic (rather than merely political) significance, it must be approached differently than either Trump or his critics have done thus far. Debates over whether (as he himself claims) Trump "changed the attitude" of the US military or whether changes he made to the rules of engagement radically altered the tactical dynamics of the conflict are of dubious importance. The former "phenomenon" is not empirically measurable, the latter is not likely to be more than marginally significant. For the role of the Trump White House in the conflict to be strategically assessed in meaningful terms different questions must be asked.

For this to take place the focus must be taken from the role of US air power, which has remained relatively constant since the fall of Mosul in June of 2014, to that of the regional ground forces engaged in the fight against ISIS, which has been variable and dynamic over the course of the conflict. From January of 2014 (with the fall of Falluja to ISIS) until May of 2015 (when it captured Ramadi) ISIS forces were on the advance, taking territory from and driving back military opponents such as the Iraqi Army and the Assad regime. That trend only reversed in late 2015, and has reached a culmination point (though not an end) now with the fall of Raqqa. In this regard, the role of the Syrian Democratic Forces, the ground troops that assaulted and occupied Raqqa with the aid of US air power, deserves scrutiny. We should ask: What has made the SDF consistently successful in opposition to ISIS, where forces like the Iraqi Army have at points yielded key ground to the jihadis? What conditions, if any, might have expedited the SDF's assault on Raqqa?

The SDF was formed in October 2015 to redress a persistent problem faced by the US-led campaign against ISIS. By that point an expensive effort initiated by the Obama administration to take a contingent of Arab Syrian rebels opposed to Bashar al-Assad and train them to serve as a free-standing force of ground troops in the fight against ISIS had failed. The anti-ISIS coalition had thus had to rely on the People's Protection Units (known by the acronym of their Kurdish name as the YPG), the military wing of the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union party, to carry out the bulk of the infantry operations in the anti-ISIS campaign, as the YPG had proven the most cohesive and tactically effective force in the Syrian theater. This strategy had produced some battlefield success, but had been hampered by the fact that reliance on the Kurdish YPG engendered suspicion and resistance among the Sunni Arab populations whose support was vital to any operations within the territory held by ISIS. It also occasioned the active resistance of regional powers such as Turkey, which feared any perceived rise in Kurdish power. The SDF was thus formed as an explicitly multi-ethnic force, with the core of the 20,000 personnel of the YPG joined to 30,000 mainly Sunni Arab fighters drawn from various groups within the Syrian opposition.

The participation of Sunni Arabs in and support for the efforts of the SDF has been crucial to the success of the campaign to retake Raqqa. This trend was slow to develop. As the Syrian-American journalist and chronicler of ISIS Hassan Hassan writes: "Many in the Syrian opposition perceived the SDF as a vehicle for the YPG and the regime. But attitudes appeared to shift just before the Raqqa operation began on June 6, 2017." Why might this have been the case? Hassan himself does not cite it as a cause, but the US missile strike against the Shayrat air base on April 7, 2017, ordered by President Trump in reprisal for the Assad regime's use of chemical weapons against Khan Shaykhun, cannot be discounted as a factor.

The logic behind such a hypothesis is very clear. Unless and until the US gave Syrian Sunni Arabs some reassurance of support against the Assad regime, they would naturally be reluctant to expend blood and resources in a campaign against ISIS, a strategic power which, while odious, posed a check on Damascus.  The Shayrat missile strike gave Syrian Sunni Arabs such assurances in a way that no gesture undertaken by the Obama administration ever did. By committing the US to military action against Assad, however minimal, President Trump foreclosed the possibility that Washington could ever be perfectly reconciled with the Assad regime, and invested political capital in the anti-Assad struggle in a way that all of the rebel groups operating in Syria could clearly understand. President Obama's failure to do this during his tenure as Commander-in-Chief was (to my mind, and as I have written before, as have others) his greatest error in the conduct of the conflict against ISIS.

Further study would obviously have to be done to corroborate such a hypothesis empirically, but any assessment of the strategic situation in Syria that has not taken these factors into account cannot have been done with due diligence. To be clear, my point here is not to enter into a partisan debate, or to suggest that the Trump and Obama administrations present us with perfectly opposed positive and negative role models, respectively. Though President Trump may have taken advantageous action and deserves credit for doing so, it is far from clear that he did so with any strategic deliberation or that he understands the strategic significance of his policies even now. Certainly it would be erroneous to argue that his White House is following any kind of consistent strategic wisdom or principle. The Trump administration, for example, has done political damage to the struggle against Boko Haram in North Africa (through adding Chad, a key ally in that struggle, to its international travel ban) equivalent to and the inverse of any political benefit accrued in Syria with the Shayrat missile strike, suggesting that both policies were arrived at arbitrarily and without regard to their strategic impact.

If it is true that the Shayrat missile strike facilitated the fall of Raqqa, this provides further evidence that the political dimensions of the strategic situation in the Levant are as or more important than the tactical deployment of firepower. In the last week, for example, the Iraqi Army occupied Kirkuk over the opposition of the Kurdish Peshmerga, a military force that held fast against ISIS even as the Iraqi Army fell back in confusion from Mosul and Ramadi. Why would the Iraqi Army perform so much better in Kirkuk than it had initially in Mosul and Ramadi? Training and experience might provide some of the explanation, but it would be foolish to discount the difference in motivation between a (mainly) Shi'ite force defending a Sunni city against a Sunni adversary and that of an Arab force aiming to liberate (what they perceive as) an Arab city from Kurdish occupation.

These lessons of Raqqa, Kirkuk, and Chad must be learned and assimilated if the recent strategic gains in the struggle against ISIS and other violent jihadis are to be maintained and consolidated. As long as the US is perceived as a credibly fair broker in the fraught conflicts between opposed ethnic, sectarian, and regional forces it will be able to rally the support necessary to achieving tactical goals. If we allow ourselves to slip back into being perceived as a biased, partisan, or irredeemably self-interested agent in the affairs of North Africa and the Middle East, we will encounter battlefield setbacks equivalent to those of 2014 or the recent tragic loss of four soldiers in Niger.