After a flurry of speculation recently that President Obama might overcome his distaste for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to go after Islamic State militants in their base inside Syria, the White House is speaking out: There will be no cooperation with the Assad regime. But even as the United States begins surveillance flights over Syria in anticipation of possible expanded US action against the Islamic State (IS), also known as ISIS, some security experts are cautioning the administration about its anti-Assad stance. While it will be possible for the US to degrade IS inside Syria without coordinating with Mr. Assad, they say, reaching more long-term objectives like defeating or even containing the group will probably mean giving up on the goal of seeing Assad step down from power.
“I don’t think it would be by any means difficult for us to carry out airstrikes [inside Syria] without a permissive environment” of cooperation from the Assad regime, says Michael Desch, an expert on international security and US defense policy at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.
But if the US objective is to “see ISIS pretty well contained,” he adds, “the only way there is with a relatively strong central government in Syria – and that means the Assad regime.”
Administration officials on Tuesday confirmed that Mr. Obama has authorized surveillance flights over Syrian territory to assess and pinpoint IS positions inside the civil-war-ravaged country, in particular the location of the militant group’s leadership. Such reconnaissance activity could be the precursor to airstrikes on IS targets such as those the US is carrying out across the border in Iraq.
The president has made no decision to expand airstrikes beyond northern Iraq into Syria, his spokesman Josh Earnest said Tuesday. But he suggested that if such action is taken, it will not be in coordination with Assad. The US does not recognize Assad as Syria’s legitimate leader, Mr. Earnest said. Other White House officials say Obama sees Assad as the source of Syria’s problems and not as a lesser evil to work with against a worse enemy.
Obama has called for Assad to step down since the early days of the Syrian conflict in 2011, insisting that it was the leader’s brutal repression of his own people that spawned the civil war and that allowed IS and other Islamist extremist groups to flourish.
Whatever course Obama takes on Syria, it will almost certainly be limited and focused on degrading IS, some say. “What they’re talking about is going after the group’s leadership inside Syria, which is very different from getting involved in Syria’s civil war,” says Lawrence Korb, a former Pentagon official now focusing on national security policy at the Center for American Progress in Washington.
But not everyone agrees that it will be possible to go after the one in Syria – IS militants – without at least tacitly acknowledging the need for the other – Assad – no matter how despised he is. Syria’s foreign minister, Walid al-Muallem, said Tuesday that his country is ready to cooperate with the US and other Western countries in fighting IS.
