As the Mosul offensive drags into its second month, another fight is raging 450km to the west around Islamic State’s de facto capital at Raqqa, on the Euphrates River in northern Syria. The battle is already a tragedy for Raqqa’s 320,000 civilians, who’ve suffered under brutal Islamic State occupation for more than three years. Many have fled, with thousands crowding into already overflowing refugee camps since the latest fighting began, and others fleeing across the hills towards the Iraqi border even as night-time temperatures plunge below freezing. Their lives, like those of families still in the city, are about to get even harder.
The battle for Raqqa will shape the Syrian war throughout the coming year. Though smaller than the vast offensive around Mosul, it will be even more significant. It may decide the fate of Islamic State’s “caliphate” in Syria and will set the tone for the incoming Trump administration’s dealings with Turkey and Russia, two critical relationships that will drive events in the region and beyond.
During a visit to the Middle East last week, I spoke to Syrian, Kurdish, Iraqi and American leaders involved in the campaign. They told me that while the military offensive is progressing about as well as anyone expected, the politics are proving characteristically complex.
The troops fighting Islamic State in Raqqa come from the Syrian Democratic Forces, a rebel coalition backed by the US, among other countries. SDF units have received a stream of weapons, training and advisers since last year. Supported by coalition airstrikes, they attacked Raqqa early last month, timing the offensive (known as Operation Euphrates Wrath) to coincide with the Mosul assault, to stop Islamic State shifting reinforcements between fronts.
The SDF has achieved considerable battlefield success. In the past month it has cleared 600sq km of rural terrain in Raqqa province, recapturing 45 villages and expelling hundreds of Islamic State fighters. Many recovered settlements are ruined, however, their populations massacred or driven off by Islamic State, or bombed out by Bashar al-Assad’s regime in previous fighting.
The frontline sits just north of Raqqa city, in Ayn Issa district, where heavy combat (including coalition airstrikes called in by observers on the ground) has killed as many as 200 Islamic State fighters in the past two weeks.
In the same timeframe, SDF spokesmen announced the recapture of the towns of Hazima, al-Taweelah and Tel al-Samman, north and west of Raqqa, bringing the SDF main force within 25km of the city’s outskirts, with reconnaissance teams pushing forward to the edge of town.
Islamic State resistance is increasing as SDF advances, and most commanders expect a ferocious fight against a determined enemy once they reach the fortified downtown area.
For commanders and their coalition advisers, much of the art of this kind of irregular warfare is guerilla diplomacy: the effort to cobble together feuding factions, tribes and ethnic groups, unite them around a common goal, and point them in the same direction — at least for a battle or two. That effort is particularly fraught in the case of the SDF, which includes several factions that are not natural allies and co-operate only through continual pressure from their advisers.
More than 25,000 SDF members — by far the largest faction in a force of about 30,000 — come from the People’s Protection Units (YPG) and the affiliated Women’s Protection Units (YPJ, an all-female combat brigade of 7000 troops). SDF also includes a few hundred Arab fighters from the Shammari tribal confederation, plus an Assyrian Christian militia and a small ethnic Turkmen force. The Shammari have a longstanding blood feud with Islamic State, which has massacred their men and boys and enslaved women and girls as it seeks to intimidate tribes in its region of influence. Christians and Turkmen are fighting for survival against Islamic State, which has engaged in genocidal slaughter against both groups wherever it has gained control. There also is a small secular nationalist force drawn from regime military defectors, the Free Officers Union. But these are minorities, perhaps 15 per cent altogether, in an alliance that is overwhelmingly Kurdish.
This has sparked concern within the majority-Arab Free Syrian Army, which has received episodic US backing, allegedly through the CIA, since 2012. FSA leaders were vociferous in their criticism in late May when General Joseph Votel, commander of US Central Command, made a surprise visit to northern Syria to meet Kurdish leaders and told accompanying journalists the US would work with “the partners it has on the ground” (that is, the Kurds) and the goal was to defeat Islamic State rather than overthrow Assad.
This is a huge concern for FSA leaders, who want to do both. They point out that Assad’s regime, at this point in the war, has killed almost 10 times as many Syrians as Islamic State.
Former FSA head General Salim Idris told an American interviewer the SDF’s Arab components were “just camouflage. SDF is the YPG, which collaborates with anyone — Assad, the Russians, the Americans — when it suits its purposes.”
Local Arabs and Turkmen have accused Kurds of ethnic cleansing in areas recaptured from Islamic State and expressed concerns that the SDF would hang on to Arab-majority towns such as Raqqa once Islamic State is gone.
Increasing Kurdish influence has sparked alarm in Turkey, too. YPG/YPJ is the armed wing of the Democratic Union Party (PYD), the dominant party of the Syrian-Kurdish autonomous region known as Rojava. This region has been effectively independent since 2012, when researchers told me their Kurdish counterparts often described themselves as the “people’s committees of western Kurdistan”, referring to the Kurdish Regional Government of Iraq.
For many, the territorial entity known as Syria ceased to exist in 2011, and their goal since then has been to create a trans-regional independent Kurdish government — Rojava — on a par with the KRG, and perhaps eventually linking with it to form an independent Kurdistan.
Another source of concern for Turkey is PYD’s affiliation with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a left-wing Kurdish movement that has been waging a separatist campaign against Turkey for three decades and is engaged in guerilla warfare across southern Turkey and along the Turkish-Syrian border.
Turkey (along with the EU and the US) has designated the PKK a terrorist group. Leaders in Ankara see any evidence of PKK influence within Rojava as a threat to Turkish territorial integrity, since an autonomous Kurdish region just across the border could encourage separatist militancy inside Turkey.
As a result, Turkish leaders have sharply criticised YPG/YPJ involvement in the Raqqa offensive. They became particularly incensed in late May when Agence France-Presse photographer Delil Souleiman snapped pictures of American advisers wearing YPG and YPJ insignia as they accompanied SDF fighters in combat north of Raqqa.
On one level, this was normal behaviour for irregular warfare operators, who typically adopt uniforms and insignia of partner units to help build rapport. But at another level — given Turkish sensitivities and PYD’s affiliation with internationally designated terrorists — wearing the insignia seemed politically tone-deaf.
FSA-YPG tensions also led to the spectacle of one US-backed Syrian rebel group fighting another. YPG killed 50 FSA fighters in April, an FSA-aligned group killed two Kurdish civilians in return, and FSA troops launched a TOW anti-armour missile against YPG positions near Aleppo. As one local analyst commented, CIA’s rebels (FSA) were fighting the US Special Operations Command’s rebels (YPG).
American advisers have been particularly sensitive to the risk of a secondary conflict between Arabs and Kurds, brokering a series of truces between the groups and putting much effort into diversifying the SDF with non-Kurdish recruits, while keeping Arab and Kurdish rebel forces on separate parts of the battlefront.
This was easier said than done, though, and ultimately failed to satisfy Turkey.
In late August, after SDF fighters captured Islamic State’s stronghold at Manbij and advanced west of the Euphrates River into northwest Syria, Turkey responded with a military invasion of Syria, Operation Euphrates Shield.
Turkish troops and Turkish-backed Syrian rebels (including a Turkmen militia affiliated with the FSA) quickly captured the city of Jarablus, launching multiple airstrikes and pushing columns of tanks and artillery into Syria, forcing the SDF back east of the Euphrates.
They also attacked Islamic State near al-Bab, pushing the terrorists back from the border, and joined a US-backed FSA offensive on al-Rai. By late September, they had launched an offensive against Islamic State’s symbolically important stronghold at Dabiq, which they succeeded in capturing in mid-October.
Turkish-led Syrian forces (allied with FSA units that included US advisers) now were fighting three enemies simultaneously: Islamic State, the Assad regime and the SDF (also with its own US advisers). Each of these enemies was also fighting the others.
The word “messy” doesn’t begin to describe the political complexity of the conflict, and that messiness is only increasing as local forces — Turkish and US- led, Arab and Kurdish — make military progress against Islamic State while jockeying against each other.
For all their effectiveness against Islamic State, American and allied support for the Kurds increases the complexity. For example, in October, even as the FSA was attacking Islamic State in al-Bab and Dabiq, Hillary Clinton (then widely assumed to be the next US president) described the Kurds as “our best partners in Syria, as well as Iraq”.
During the second presidential debate on October 9, Clinton said that arming the Kurds would be central to her strategy against Islamic State, and proposed making them the principal force pushing Islamic State out of Raqqa.
This generated widespread concern among Turkish leaders and across northern Syria, with FSA and other groups worrying aloud that SDF might not be willing to relinquish control over territory it recaptured from Islamic State or the Assad regime.
That regime, for its part, is less focused on Raqqa and more concerned about regaining control of Syria’s second city, Aleppo, which — with intensive support from Russian aircraft and missile strikes, and from Hezbollah and Iranian troops on the ground — regime forces have been attempting to recapture in a bloody offensive of their own.
Syrian regime figures often talk about “useful Syria”, by which they seem to mean a rump state controlled from Damascus that includes Syria’s Mediterranean coastal region, the Alawite hills, the agricultural breadbasket of western Syria and a network of key cities.
Aleppo is the northern anchor of this core region, and its strategic location — apart from its political importance — explains the regime’s extensive and brutal effort to recapture it. Areas such as Raqqa, along with Rojava and the vast deserts of the country’s east and southeast, lie outside “useful Syria” and are not a focus for Assad or his allies at present.
But the notion of a regime-controlled core is a bit of a myth. In areas marked on the map as under regime control, the reality is more a patchwork of local control by military commanders, militia leaders, local governance committees and warlords, many of whom have criminal ties and engage in organised crime (including extortion and intimidation of their own population, and trading with Islamic State and other rebels).
Outside the main cities, Assad’s writ runs lightly if at all: local leaders unite to seek assistance from Damascus when threatened by rebel groups, but don’t otherwise follow central direction with any reliability.
The economy has all but collapsed, more than half the population is displaced or depends entirely on humanitarian assistance, and the state came close to imploding last year.
It was the regime’s near-death experience mid last year that prompted Russia’s military intervention and increased Iranian engagement. And although this helped stabilise the frontlines and stave off an immediate collapse, it also further eroded the regime’s control over its own destiny, which now is increasingly dictated by powerful allies.
These allies — particularly the Russians — seem to be following a strategy of turning Syria into a frozen conflict, along the same lines as Ukraine.
Russia has deployed a naval task group centred on its only aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, to support the offensive against Aleppo. It also has been providing extensive military and logistical support to the regime’s effort to consolidate control over western Syria.
But, beyond that, Russia seems to have little desire and less capacity to recapture the rest of the country.
Rather, the Kremlin’s goal seems to be to prop up the regime, retain control of the strategic Russian naval base at Tartous, put Assad into the strongest possible negotiating position for an eventual resolution of the conflict, and work towards a collaborative relationship with the incoming Trump administration.
As president-elect Donald Trump assembles his cabinet, the make-up of that administration, along with the outlines of its Syria policy, remains vague. He argued on the campaign trail that US support for the Syrian rebels since 2011 had been too little, too late, and too divisive to make any meaningful difference.
Trump also clearly put defeating Islamic State at the top of his agenda, calling at different times for “bombing the shit out of ISIS” and working with Russia and perhaps the Assad regime to crush the group.
Key advisers — including former general Mike Flynn, the designated national security adviser — have been criticised in the American media for supposedly having close and cosy relationships with the Kremlin. This is vastly overstating the case; Flynn, for example, once spoke at a conference sponsored by the Kremlin-backed media network Russia Today, but so have many other American figures from both sides of politics.
Flynn does, however, seem to have a less adversarial attitude to Russia than many of those who would have served in a Clinton administration, and his relations with Turkey are also better than those of many current administration officials, whose reaction to Turkey’s failed coup attempt and subsequent crackdown in July and August (along with Clinton’s support for the Kurds) contributed to frosty relations.
More broadly, Flynn — like the rest of the incoming administration, including Trump — has little or no political baggage, and is thus far freer to change existing policy to seek a resolution to the conflict.
Whether the new administration reverses course, however, depends largely on what happens between now and inauguration day on January 20. This is what makes the fighting around Raqqa so strategically important.
If the SDF and its coalition backers succeed in capturing Raqqa and expelling Islamic State before the new administration takes office, Trump may well double down on that success.
By contrast, if the Raqqa attack bogs down over the northern winter while the Russian-backed regime offensive against Aleppo continues to gain ground, the pressure to make a deal with Damascus and Moscow will be intense.
For the incoming administration in Washington, the outcome of the Raqqa battle will therefore set the tone for its relationship with both countries, which in turn will shape much of the global security environment for the next several years.
For Islamic State, it will mean the difference between retaining a territorial foothold at the western extremity of its pseudo-state and being forced back underground into guerilla warfare mode.
For ordinary Syrians caught up in the conflict, it will be a matter of life and death — and for all these reasons, Raqqa bears watching during the next couple of months.
David Kilcullen is a former lieutenant-colonel in the Australian Army and was a senior adviser to US general David Petraeus in 2007-08, when he helped to design the Iraq war coalition troop surge. He also was a special adviser for counter-insurgency to former US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice. He is the author of Blood Year: Islamic State and the Failures of the War on Terror (Black Inc).
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