New: U.S. forces attacked a weapons depot at an undisclosed location inside Syria on Tuesday, officials at Central Command announced afterward. “The strike is in response to an Iranian-aligned attack against U.S. forces in Syria [Monday],” CENTCOM said.
By the way: President-elect Donald Trump again wants to remove all U.S. troops from Syria, as he did five years ago when the declared American presence fell to 900 from 2,500 troops. But that would be a mistake, Charles Lister of the Middle East Institute argued Friday.
“While ISIS has conducted just 53 attacks in Iraq so far in 2024, it has been behind more than 600 next door, in Syria,” Lister writes. Relatedly, “ISIS is doubling its attack tempo across Syria compared to 2023, while tripling it in northeast Syria, where US forces operate alongside our Syrian Democratic Forces partners.”
ISIS has reconstituted itself in regime-held areas of Syria, but Central Command has responded more directly in recent weeks, “launching three rounds of heavy strikes on ISIS training camps that, until then, had been left alone by Assad, Russia, and Iran,” Lister says.
Why bring it up: “Given the chaos that prevails across Syria and the regime’s inability to deal with the terrorist group, US troops are the glue holding together the only meaningful challenge to an ISIS resurgence,” Lister argues. And that glue is a bargain for the money, he says.
The Syria mission accounts for just 0.2% of the total U.S. defense budget, Lister estimates. And “The counter-ISIS mission in Syria and Iraq has also grown more cost efficient, with today’s overall budget being 60% less than in 2019.” That means, “For a US taxpayer, the Syria mission currently costs approximately $8 per year, or 67 cents a month,” says Lister. And as such, “Syria offers a case study of extraordinary success achieved at record low levels of expense and risk,” he writes. But perhaps most importantly, “To abandon the mission now would bring no meaningful benefit to the US, but it would swiftly and significantly empower America’s adversaries, like ISIS, Iran, Russia, and Assad’s regime.” Read the rest, here.
Elsewhere in Syria, an alliance of militants and terrorists renewed their fight against the Assad regime and Russian troops. The latest flareup appears to have occurred in northwestern Syria around Aleppo, and its the first of its kind in four years, Lister reported separately Wednesday.
That impromptu offensive “appears to have overrun a Russia special forces position, as Assad regime forces collapsed,” Lister said, with supporting open-source imagery. “Make no mistake, this is a potentially transformative moment in Syria's ‘frozen conflict,’ which truthfully has never really been frozen,” he wrote.
Trendspotting: Iraqi militias have been quietly reducing their attacks against Israel for the past several weeks, analyst Mike Knights of the Washington Institute noted on social media Tuesday. Overall there have been “fewer claims and less solid-looking claims,” as well as “more exaggeration,” he writes alongside a chart illustrating these metrics.
One big change seems to have occurred nine days ago, “when Israel openly warned Iraq to stop the militia drone attacks,” said Knights. “And right after, a downward slop[e] becomes a cliff: attacks all but stop,” and the remaining “7x claims are somewhat dubious,” he added. As his colleague Hamdi Malik observed the day after Israel’s warning, “the militias don't seem to know how to react publicly to Israel's warning: they want to sound tough, but they don't want to be targeted.”
On the bright side, “They like drinking coffee in hotels and being playboys: they're mostly not real resistance men,” said Knights. What’s more, “Iran doesn't want them wrecked either.” And “That all adds up to good prospects for de-escalation,” he argued Tuesday.
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