Syria’s U.S.-trained opposition fighters wait to learn of new role : NPR

AL-TANF GARRISON, Syria — When Salim Turki al-Anteri took his opposition forces into battle towards regime troops in southern Syria this month, it was towards his personal former tank unit.

Drawing on his previous U.S. navy coaching and his hopes for a united Syria, the commander ordered his forces to fireside artillery warning pictures, meant to steer regime troopers to desert their tanks and go away the battlefield.

“We did not wish to kill any troopers,” he says of the battle on Dec. 7, a day earlier than Damascus fell.

“We aimed to the left and to the correct, after which nearer to them,” he says. “We did not observe them as a result of we knew that if we adopted them, we must kill them.”

Not like many navy commanders who have been regime loyalists, most extraordinary troopers have been conscripts who’d been given no selection however to combat for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, he says.

“I contemplate all of the troopers my sons,” he says. And he thought-about the tanks they fought in tools to be safeguarded for the nation’s military — no matter form it might absorb a post-Assad Syria.

Syrian regime tanks sit deserted on the Damascus-Baghdad freeway in Syria, Dec. 13. Most regime troopers retreated reasonably than combat opposition forces this month.

Manu Brabo for NPR

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Manu Brabo for NPR

Anteri, a colonel and the commander of the Syrian Free Military, a small, U.S.-trained opposition drive earlier than the autumn of the Syrian regime, spoke with NPR at his base subsequent to a distant U.S. navy outpost in southern Syria. He defected from the Syrian military to hitch the opposition eight years in the past.

Now his unit is amongst dozens of former opposition teams that must be knitted collectively into new Syrian safety forces. Anteri, who instructions about 600 fighters, says he’s ready to see what position within the new safety forces his group can be given by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which led the coalition that drove Assad from energy.

The U.S. has had an uneasy position on this key area

Al-Tanf, initially a U.S. particular forces base, has performed a key position in coaching Syrian opposition fighters, together with Anteri’s. It lies about 200 miles from Syria’s capital Damascus, on the principle Damascus-Baghdad freeway. Deserted regime tanks lie by the facet of the street. Close by are cast-off Syrian military uniforms, tossed apart by fleeing troopers as Assad fell.

The Syrian ruler was rapidly toppled in a shock offensive this month by opposition forces, who took again the nation with little resistance after greater than a decade of civil conflict. Anteri believes the rationale the regime troopers his forces encountered did not combat again was as a result of they knew the U.S. navy was backing the SFA. Together with a patch bearing the Syrian insignia on his fighters’ uniforms, he additionally instructed troopers to put on a patch with an American flag.

The American base at al-Tanf is testomony to the uneasy U.S. position in a key strategic area. The U.S. has not had diplomatic relations with Syria since 2012, after the beginning of the Syrian civil conflict. The bases it established over the previous decade within the south and east function below no Syrian authorized authority. They fall below the U.S.-led anti-ISIS coalition working in Iraq and Syria, however that coalition is quickly being dismantled.

A Syrian Free Military soldier stands on the entrance of a base close to the U.S. al-Tanf garrison in southern Syria, Dec. 14.

Manu Brabo for NPR

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Manu Brabo for NPR

It’s a navy presence so opaque that Pentagon spokesperson Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder informed reporters earlier this month that he himself solely lately realized there have been greater than double the variety of U.S. forces in Syria because the 900 determine he had been quoting. Iraqi navy sources had reported elevated numbers of troops shifting from a U.S. base in Irbil, in its Kurdistan area, over the previous a number of months into Kurdish-controlled northeastern Syria.

The U.S. position in Syria can be clarified as new governments in each nations take form

A senior U.S. navy official mentioned increasing the U.S. navy position in Syria would require talks with any new Syrian authorities.

“We do not wish to begin simply tromping round Syria,” mentioned the official, who requested anonymity as a result of he was not approved to talk publicly. “It might be higher if we understood how they felt about that and open that dialogue with them earlier than we do something.”

He mentioned pending these discussions, the U.S. would proceed to launch airstrikes towards the Islamic State — which it largely defeated 5 years in the past — and to help Syrian forces it trains and advises. Additionally in query, after all, is what determination the incoming Trump administration will make on sustaining U.S. forces in Syria.

That U.S.-led anti-ISIS coalition is being disbanded on the insistence of the Iraqi authorities, to get replaced by country-to-country agreements. Beneath the settlement between Iraq and the USA, there can be a U.S. troop presence in federally managed Iraq by the tip of this 12 months, and in Kurdish-controlled Iraq by the tip of 2026.

U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria have been a lightning rod for Iran-backed militias. In January, one such militia in Iraq claimed duty for a drone assault on Tower 22 — a U.S. help base to al-Tanf in northeastern Jordan. Three U.S. troopers have been killed within the assault.

A Syrian Free Military fighter walks with a resident of the Rukban camp for displaced Syrians close to the Jordanian border. Till the Syrian regime fell, 7,000 camp residents, together with opposition fighters, have been trapped within the distant desert for years.

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Since 2003, when the U.S. and its allies toppled Iraqi chief Saddam Hussein and left a safety vacuum after disbanding the Iraqi military, proliferating Iranian proxy militias have used Syria as a conduit to funnel Iranian arms to Iraq and Lebanon. Assad, a member of the Alawite spiritual minority, was backed by Iran and, in recent times, by Russia.

Syrian Kurdish forces, who created an autonomous area after breaking their territory away from the Assad regime in 2012, stay a key U.S. safety ally, and helped militarily defeat ISIS in its final holdout in Baghuz, Syria, in 2019. The persevering with U.S. troop presence on this autonomous area of northeastern Syria additionally serves to guard oil fields there.

Though ISIS has been massively diminished because it overtook massive elements of Iraq and Syria in 2014, it nonetheless retains a presence in Syria, together with close to historic Palmyra, the place SFA commander Anteri is from.

In the meantime, former opposition teams watch for steering on their new position

Now, three weeks after many years of regime management abruptly ended, the victory by disparate teams of Syrian fighters continues to be sinking in.

In a visitor home subsequent to the U.S. base, an SFA officer, Saeed Saif, exhibits a variety of kit discovered at a Russian navy base in Syria after it was deserted within the combating in early December.

U.S. officers, together with the senior navy official, say Russia is predicted to supply concessions to the brand new Syrian authorities to retain its strategic deep water port within the Syrian coastal metropolis Tartus.

A Syrian Free Military fighter stands a number of hundred yards from a sand berm marking the border between Jordan and Syria on the outskirts of Rukban camp in southern Syria, Dec. 14.

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From the deserted Russian navy base, there are outdated fuel masks and model new Kalashnikov rifles — some nonetheless stacked within the picket field they have been shipped in. There’s a communications machine to ship encoded messages and paperwork and information taken from a vault in an underground operations room.

“We do not know what they are saying,” Saif says. “We’re ready for somebody to translate them.”

Extra puzzling are what seem like paperweights — scorpions encased in plastic and mounted on bases.

“They used them for adornment,” Saif says.