Tracking Islamic State

December 13, 2016, will live in infamy -- the day the resistance battling Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's forces essentially crumbled and yielded their stronghold of the city of Aleppo to government forces. Social media was ablaze with pro-Assad supporters talking of the city's "liberation," while those who vehemently oppose Assad's regime tweeted their despair and fear of the brutalities that might be meted out to the civilian population.

Such fears appear to well-grounded, considering this tweet from the official feed of the United Kingdom's mission to the United Nations:

But in the uproar over Aleppo, one incident seems to have been forgotten. Mere days before the city fell, another event of significance occurred in Syria's never-ending catalogue of military victories and defeats, attacks and retreats, seizures and counter-advances. On December 11, the extremist group Islamic State (IS) recaptured the ancient city of Palmyra from the pro-Assad coalition: It was an astounding reversal of fortune given the group's loss of large swathes of its self-proclaimed caliphate over the past six months.

When IS was driven from the city in May, largely thanks to the power of Russian air strikes and, reportedly, private military contractors, it was hailed as vindication for Moscow, which claimed to have joined the Syrian conflict to defeat IS -- despite focusing most of its military firepower against more moderate CIA-backed rebel groups, some of which were fiercely battling IS. Indeed, it appeared that Russia was more concerned with protecting its naval facility at Tartus and propping up Assad than any genuine desire to battle the most successful jihadist group in history.

Even before Russian President Vladimir Putin declared mission accomplished in Syria and announced a partial withdrawal of Russian troops from Syria in April 2016 (a withdrawal that never materialized), Washington had estimated that 80-90 percent of Russian air strikes targeted non-IS rebels.

But the capture of Palmyra, crowed commentators like the Independent's Robert Fisk, proved that this was not the case. Palmyra provided some with the ammunition to advance the narrative that it was in fact Russia, and not the United States, that was truly taking the fight to IS.

Now, barely six months later, Assad's Russian-backed forces have allowed Palmyra to slip from their hands. This is instructive. Russia's original seizure of the city was never about fighting IS. Rather, its goal was two-fold: to seize oil and gas fields in the area, and to score a symbolic victory of recapturing such a historic city from notorious extremists.

Moscow made full propagandistic use of its victory -- holding a concert among the city's ancient ruins, in front of journalists flown in from all over the world, to show the world that it had driven IS from the city. From start to finish it was a marvelously executed spectacle.

Even after the fall of Palmyra, however, Russia had a problem -- a perennial one: the incompetence of Assad. Despite all the assistance he was receiving from his coalition that has kept him in place -- a loose grouping that includes fighters from the Lebanese extremist group Hizballah, Shi'ite militias from Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commandos, and the Russian military and private mercenaries, the rebels began to drive regime forces out of the strategically vital city of Aleppo over the summer.

Russia was, accordingly, forced to turn its attentions to Aleppo -- a city with no IS presence whatsoever -- which it began to pound from the air in order to achieve its true goal -- keeping Assad in power. The result was inevitable -- in both cases. Aleppo fell and Palmyra, now devoid of Russian attention, was retaken by IS -- its first successful territorial conquest in two years.

This was a state of affairs not lost on Robert Ford, the former U.S. ambassador to Syria, who tweeted:

What makes matters worse is that Aleppo's fall and Palmyra's recapture come just as Washington has agreed to send 200 more troops to Syria to fight IS.

IS's Treasure Trove

Their job will now be made all the harder -- and more dangerous. Thanks to Russia's abandonment of the city to focus on destroying rebel opposition to Assad in Aleppo, IS easily saw off Syrian forces who were so keen to flee they left behind a treasure trove of military hardware for IS in their wake. According to Syrian expert Hassan Hassan, the National Defense Force, a pro-Assad militia unit, "left most of the heavy weapons without a fight." Amaq, IS's news outlet, he continued, claims that 100 pro-regime fighters were killed in the battle and that, critically, IS seized 30 tanks, six BMP infantry fighting vehicles, six 122mm artillery pieces, other smaller artillery, and "untold antitank missiles, grad missiles, tank shells & ammunition."

A video of IS's spoils of war shows that the extremist group captured artillery pieces, heavy antiaircraft machine guns that pose a potent threat to both helicopters and targets on the ground, crates of Kalashnikov assault rifles, submachine guns, large quantities of artillery and mortar shells, and boxes of ammunition. Beyond this, IS will now be in possession of more supplies that are useful for running a military campaign in the desert. An investigation by The Interpreter shows that bank cards from Russian financial institutions and other items with Cyrillic script are present in the video. Whoever was there before IS showed up -- the Russian military, Russian private military contractors, or someone else -- left in a hurry and left behind a good amount of firepower and equipment.

These are weapons may now be turned against U.S. forces that are genuinely battling IS in Syria and Iraq. IS's seizure of the Jazal oil field, the Al-Mahr oil field, the Jahar gas field and the Hayan gasoline company in the areas surrounding Palmyra could also enable IS to replenish its coffers by selling oil and natural gas from the area once again.

Since there do not seem to be any new developments on the geopolitical front that would change Russia's calculus, it seems clear that Russian efforts to prop up Assad -- and destroy the shrinking nonjihadist opposition -- will continue unabated.

It's a salutary reminder that the fall of Aleppo is a catastrophe for the Syrian people but of little relevance to the fight against IS. In fact, as Palmyra shows, Russian actions have only strengthened the beleaguered Islamic State -- an accomplishment that may possibly be paid for in American lives.

The views expressed in this blog post do not necessarily reflect the views of RFE/RL

On the afternoon of August 31, 2013, French Rafale fighter jets bristled on their runways, readied for war. As far as French President Francois Hollande was concerned, D-Day had arrived; at 3 a.m. his planes would begin air strikes against missile batteries and command centers of the Syrian Army's 4th Armored Division -- the Syrian military's most trusted military unit, and the one in charge of chemical weapons.

The reason: Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had crossed U.S. President Barack Obama's "red line" when, just 10 days earlier, he had apparently used chemical weapons in Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus, against the rebels battling him and the civilians who, as usual, bore the brunt of Assad's fury. According to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, it was the regime's third -- and deadliest -- use of sarin gas to date. Now it was time to for the United States and its allies to make good on the president's word.

But at the last minute, Obama called Hollande to tell him the strikes were off; he would instead seek the backing of Congress before any military action was taken. It was support he most likely knew he would not get; at nearly the last possible moment, he had changed course.

This development was perhaps not entirely unsurprising. A key tenet of Obama's first presidential campaign was to withdraw the United States from its costly and bloody adventurism in the Middle East, a promise that was well received by an American public that had been at war since the 2001 intervention in Afghanistan and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Since then, Obama has largely managed to keep his country out of the Middle East despite the region's descent into sanguinary chaos as Libya, Iraq, and Syria have steadily disintegrated while the militant group Islamic State (IS) has murdered its way into global headlines.

The United States has conducted air strikes against IS targets in Syria and Iraq, while it has "advisers" on the ground supporting the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) and various groups battling IS in Syria. But, despite the White House's seeming refusal to be drawn into battle on the ground, U.S. involvement may go deeper than many Americans believe. This month an improvised explosive device (IED) killed a U.S. Navy bomb-disposal technician in the town of Ain Issa, less than 60 kilometers from the de facto capital of IS's self-proclaimed caliphate -- making Senior Chief Petty Officer Scott C. Dayton the first U.S. serviceman to die in Syria and the fifth to be killed while fighting IS since 2015.

Many Americans -- especially those of an isolationist bent -- fear IS as a global terrorist threat and support an air campaign against the extremist group but discount its direct threat in Syria as of little concern. This is wrong. U.S. soldiers are indeed involved in the fight on the ground. America's sons and daughters in Syria are personally at risk from IS -- a fact that has so far been downplayed in the public discussion.

As Michael Weiss, senior editor at the Daily Beast and author of The New York Times bestseller ISIS: Inside The Army Of Terror, puts it: "U.S. Special Forces have been recorded embedded with Pentagon-backed rebel forces, such as Liwa al Mutasim, in northern Aleppo, where they were shouted at by Islamist rivals. Their remit may be to 'advise' or to help call in air strikes but it's naive to think that they won't, or don't, engage in combat."

He continues: "Their counterparts in Syria have traded direct fire with [IS] militants who have ambushed Kurdish Peshmerga (one incident previously resulted in the death of another U.S. soldier). The Pentagon likes to fudge this with terminology but the fact is: American boots are on the ground, and American servicemen are in an active state of war against [IS] -- and potentially any other hostile parties they come in contact with."

U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter echoed Weiss's point, albeit more obliquely, with a public statement on Dayton's death: "I am deeply saddened by the news on this Thanksgiving Day that one of our brave service members has been killed in Syria while protecting us from the evil of ISIL," he said, using another shorthand term for IS. "It is a painful reminder of the dangers that men and women in uniform face around the world to keep us safe."

War By Any Other Name

There are around 500 U.S. troops in Syria -- in April, President Obama sent 250 to add to the 50 that were already in the country. The number since then has, accordingly, almost doubled. Earlier in November, Carter announced that the U.S.-supported coalition of Kurdish and Arab forces fighting IS known as the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) had begun the task of retaking Raqqa. As Iraqi forces meanwhile close in on the city of Mosul, in Iraq, the dual IS losses could signal the end of the last pretenses of its purported caliphate.

The numbers may be small, but evidence of "mission creep" is clear. Again, Weiss is unequivocal: "We are involved on the ground," he says. "We have CIA operatives in Iraq and Syria and U.S. soldiers. About 300 in Syria, close to 5/6K in Iraq. It's just not an occupation or 'major combat role,' but this is where 'war' is given to sort of Orwellian euphemisms that U.S. bureaucracy loves to use to deny it is doing exactly what you think it is doing."

The United States is fighting IS in Syria and Iraq in all but name. And as IS becomes increasingly besieged in both countries, it will become more desperate -- and more violent. Traditional warfare will be forsaken in favor of greater use of insurgency tactics. More booby traps and IEDs will lie in wait for both the SDF and ISF; and more U.S. servicemen may die.

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has promised to bomb IS heavily and has talked about "extreme vetting" of Muslims traveling or potentially immigrating to the United States for fear of terrorist infiltration. But these views do little to address the reality on the ground that IS poses a threat not just as a worldwide militant group that can inspire atrocities on U.S. soil but also as a military threat to U.S. soldiers already fighting in Syria.

As much as some may deny it, the United States is once again fighting a war in the Middle East.

The views expressed in this blog post do not necessarily reflect the views of RFE/RL