Last week the Trump administration announced that it will begin arming the Syrian Kurdish militia known as the YPG—a plan long favored by the American military brass—in the hope that it will make a decisive push toward the Islamic State (IS) capital of Raqqa. While the YPG has proved an effective fighting force, it also has ties to Iran, to the regime of Bashar al-Assad himself, and to Kurdish terrorists in Turkey. And that, writes Max Boot, is only the tip of the iceberg:
With any luck, IS will lose its strongholds on both sides of the Iraq-Syria border by the end of the year. But who will then administer the territory? The U.S. hope is that locals of moderate predilection will take control of their own communities and that Syria will devolve into a series of autonomous cantons. But if there is one thing we should have learned from the past decade and a half in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is that moderates can seldom stand on their own against well-organized extremists like IS and al-Qaeda.
In Syria, the moderate opposition has been losing ground for years, thanks in large part to Western neglect. Growing stronger have been the government forces of Assad—backed by Iran and Russia—and the Sunni extremists of al-Qaeda’s Syrian chapter, which . . . is becoming the strongest force in opposition-controlled areas and stands to benefit from IS’s demise.
If the administration has a plan to prevent al-Qaeda from gaining at IS’s expense, it remains a closely guarded secret. . . . Nor does the administration seem to have any plan to diminish the power of Shiite extremist groups such as Hizballah, which have become an increasingly powerful force in government-controlled areas.
As far as I can tell, the administration hopes that, by defeating IS, it will enable negotiations to create some kind of Syrian confederation with Kurds, Sunnis, and Alawites dividing up the country among them. This may be the ultimate endgame, but it will only work if none of these cantons is under the sway of violent extremists. . . . Likewise, Syria will never see peace or stability so long as Shiite and Sunni fanatics remain dominant on both sides. Indeed, simply the continuing rule by the war criminal Bashar al-Assad ensures that the majority of the population will continue to remain in revolt, consigning Syria to perpetual warfare.
Read more on Commentary: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/foreign-policy/middle-east/syria/syria/