US calls on Arab allies to do more for themselves militarily

The United States will send 200 additional military personnel including special forces to the campaign against Daesh in Syria to create a “tornado” of pressure against the group’s Raqqa hub, US Defence Secretary Ash Carter said today, as the US continued to fail to act against the Assad regime.

Carter, speaking in Bahrain to regional security chiefs, twinned the announcement with a call on Middle East allies to do more for their own defence, a sore topic with some Gulf states who resent being seen by Washington as military “free riders”.

The arrival of the 200 additional forces in Syria, joining 300 special forces already there backing local allies, including some like the Kurdish PYD who have been accused of ethnic cleansing against Syrian Sunni Arabs, would bring to bear the “full weight of US forces around the theatre of operations like the funnel of a giant tornado,” Carter said.

“The sooner we crush both the fact and the idea of an Islamic state based on ISIL’s barbaric ideology, the safer we’ll all be,” he said at the Manama Dialogue security conference, using various acronyms for the Daesh extremist organisation.

Syria’s civil war pits President Bashar Al-Assad, backed by Iran, Russia and thousands of Shia jihadists, against mostly Sunni Arab opposition forces backed by Turkey, Gulf monarchies and the United States.

However, support for the Syrian opposition has been lacklustre at best, leading many in the Syrian opposition against the Assad regime to speculate that they are being abandoned in favour of Al-Assad who has managed to portray himself as the only force capable of stopping Daesh.

Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria are the pillars of Daesh’s self-declared caliphate, and recapturing them would be a pivotal defeat for the group, though there is talk that they would simply resort to asymmetric guerrilla warfare once they lose territory.

Carter said that despite the eventual defeat of Daesh in Syria, the violence there would not stop until an end was put to the civil war, and Russia’s intervention to back Al-Assad had only inflamed the conflict.

Russia entered into the war saying it wanted to promote a smooth political transition and fight Daesh and other “terrorists”, a term it uses loosely and freely to describe any anti-Assad regime factions irrespective of their involvement with acts of terror.

Although Russia claimed to be fighting for this, “it did neither of those things,” Carter said.

US allies ‘aren’t doing enough’

Syrian regime advances in Aleppo mean the government appears closer to victory than at any point since 2011 protests against Al-Assad evolved into an armed rebellion against his family’s near half-a-century of despotic rule.

The war has killed about half a million people and made more than half of Syrians homeless, and in desperate need of aid. Aid has been denied to areas held by the opposition, including in eastern Aleppo.

In Iraq, Carter said his main concern was that the effort to stabilise the Mosul region after it was “liberated”, by rebuilding towns, services and communities, “will lag behind the military campaign”, and said that Arabian Gulf countries could help to ensure that does not happen.

Carter reiterated a US call for more defence cooperation among Arabian Gulf states, a delicate question ever since President Barack Obama last year told The Atlantic magazine some states in the Gulf and Europe were “free-riders” who called for US action without getting involved themselves.

Most Gulf states see Obama, keen to extricate Washington from conflicts across the world, as unappreciative of their willingness to host US bases and purchase US weapons, as well as a US president who panders to the Shia Iranian regime at the expense of stability in the region.

“Mutual interest requires mutual commitment,” Carter said. “I would ask you to imagine what US military and defence leaders think when they have to listen to complaints sometimes that we should do more, when it’s plain to see that all too often, the ones complaining aren’t doing enough themselves.”