WASHINGTON — US troops are steering clear of the fight between Islamist opposition factions led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and forces aligned with the government of President Bashar al-Assad in northwest Syria, Pentagon officials said on Monday. That, despite advances by the rebels in also driving out local Kurdish-led forces from key pockets in Tel Rifaat and Aleppo.
“Let me be clear that the US is in no way involved in the operations you see playing out in and around Aleppo in northwestern Syria,” Defense Department press secretary US Air Force Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder told a group of reporters on Monday.
“We’re obviously monitoring the situation, which is on the other side of Syria,” Ryder underscored.
Why it matters: The Biden administration has denied any involvement with HTS’ surprise offensive, which saw the rebels capture Syria’s second city, Aleppo, for the first time since 2016, marking a stunning upset for the Assad regime.
The United States considers HTS to be a terrorist organization. The Biden administration has also sustained a punishing campaign of economic sanctions on Damascus, although Washington formally eschewed any ambitions of ousting Assad via military action during the Obama administration.
A vestigial contingent of several hundred US troops continues to support Syria’s Kurdish-led alliance, formally known as the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), in the country’s far east-northeast corner near the border with Iraq — part of a shared mission to prevent the return of the Islamic State group.
In a press statement released over the weekend, the White House said it is working with regional governments and allies to urge “de-escalation, protection of civilians and minority groups, and a serious and credible political process that can end this civil war once and for all.”
HTS’ offensive risks scrambling long-stalemated frontlines dividing Syria into a patchwork of statelets and could potentially open up a vacuum for more extreme ideological groups to exploit, should the opposition forces become overstretched.
US national security adviser Jake Sullivan offered an ambivalent take on the Sunday talk-show circuit, expressing concern about HTS’ intended objectives while also noting that administration officials “don’t cry over the fact that the Assad government — backed by Russia, Iran and Hezbollah — is facing certain kinds of pressure.”
Mixed messages: So far Washington has made no indication it intends to defend its Syrian Kurdish-led partners. The US military similarly stood down in 2018 amid a Turkish-led offensive into the majority-Kurdish ethnic enclave of Afrin, and again in 2019 amid another Turkish-led Syrian rebel incursion to seize border areas between and Tel Abyad and Ras al-Ayn.
Washington’s delayed response to HTS’ offensive has raised concerns among Kurdish leadership that the United States may once again be abandoning them amid what they have publicly decried as a new land-grab by Turkey and its proxies. Unlike those territories, however, the demographics in Tel Rifaat and Aleppo are more ethnically diverse and thus less centrally important to the Kurdish project.
Among the areas potentially in the crosshairs of Turkey-backed opposition militias is the city of Manbij, which lies just west of the Euphrates. Until this past weekend, the city had marked the frontier between the US- and SDF-controlled northeast and pockets of territory further west controlled jointly by Kurdish fighters and Kurdish pro-Assad forces. It is those latter areas that have since been seized by Islamist opposition factions amid their breakout offensive.
American patrols largely withdrew from Manbij after an aborted US attempt at withdrawal in late 2019, which was first ordered and then reversed by then-President Donald Trump. The move enabled Russian troops to flow into the city in coordination with Kurdish forces there.
Yet Russia, whose military largely remains bogged down in the Ukraine war, may be pushed to defend more strategic sectors of Syria if HTS’ offensive continues unabated.
Opposition fighters have reportedly reached Ma’arat an-Nu’man and the outskirts of Hama. If they can consolidate control of those areas, it would put them within roughly 90 miles of the Kremlin’s strategic naval facility at Tartous, and an even closer to Russia’s key air base at Hmeimim.
That has raised eyebrows in Washington over how far Ankara may be willing to allow things to go and what Russia’s military intends to do in response. Russian aircraft continued to pummel populated areas of Aleppo on Monday amid anticipation of a coming counterattack.
Concerns over the rapidly shifting battlefield led Army Maj. Gen. Kevin Leahy — the newly sworn-in top commander of US-led forces in Iraq and Syria — to tap a dedicated phone line linking him to Russia’s top commander in Syria, Sergei Kisel, in search of answers.
“We have that communication mechanism to prevent potential miscalculation,” Ryder told reporters on Monday, noting that American troops in Syria remain poised to defend themselves.
Neither the Kremlin nor US officials confirmed reports on Monday that Kisel has been relieved of duty.
Kurds raise alarm: The SDF declared a general mobilization on Sunday in response to the threat HTS’ advance poses to the enclaves it controls across the country’s north.
“For the past few days, our fighters, whether on the Manbij front or on the west side of the Euphrates, have been fighting against these attacks,” the SDF said in a press release. The Kurdish-led alliance called on Syrians of all ethnic and religious groups to “stand shoulder-to-shoulder” and “join the ranks of the SDF” in opposition to the Islamist fighters’ advances.
A video released on Telegram on Monday purported to show Syrian Arab fighters mocking members of what appeared to be an SDF convoy allegedly leaving Sheikh Maqsoud as part of an agreement between the two sides. (Authenticity of the video has not been confirmed.)
“We’re focused on the defeat ISIS mission because of the security vacuum that has been created by this ongoing civil war,” Pentagon spokesman Ryder told reporters on Monday.
“That is why US forces deployed to the region: to counter ISIS. That’s what we stay focused on, also recognizing the fact that the Syrian regime has significant challenges right now in terms of their own security and stability,” he said.
Thus far, there’s also been no sign of US strikes to interdict the reported movement of Iran-backed militias across Iraq’s western border to reinforce the Syrian regime.
The US military preemptively struck militia forces in eastern Syria to thwart an “imminent threat” targeting Mission Support Site-Euphrates at the al-Omar oil field — Syria’s largest — on Nov. 29, Pentagon officials confirmed Monday.
That strike was “completely unrelated” to the situation unfolding Syria’s far northwest, Ryder told reporters.