In Syria free-for-all, US aims to break ISIS and protect allies

The quick toppling of the Syrian regime – punctuated by the flight of leader Bashar al-Assad to Moscow – came as a surprise to U.S. military officials.

“I think everybody expected to see a much more stiff resistance from Assad’s forces,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said Monday as the regime was agreeing to hand over power to the Sunni Islamist Syrian rebel group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).

Now the Department of Defense is closely watching whether pockets of Islamic State (ISIS) fighters – who controlled 34,000 square miles and 2 million people at the height of their self-described caliphate a decade ago – will try to “take advantage of this opportunity and regain capability,” Secretary Austin said. 

The United States, too, is sussing out opportunities amid a strategic free-for-all. As it scrambles to keep a strong presence in the vortex of world powers operating in Syria, the U.S. military is hoping to protect vulnerable allies and hit ISIS hard enough so that it never regroups. 

For this, the U.S. has roughly 900 troops in Syria. But times of transition are precarious, and these forces face particular risk now that the country’s government has collapsed, analysts say.

As if to highlight these concerns – and to allay them – U.S. Central Command, which runs Pentagon operations in Syria, announced that it conducted “dozens” of airstrikes against ISIS operatives and training camps Monday.

Today, Israel  Defense Minister Israel Katz said  Mr. Assad’s Navy  was destroyed to keep it from falling “into the hands of extremists,”  It’s one of hundreds of hits by Israeli warplanes since the rebel takeover.

Intelligence specialists are still assessing the results of these strikes – which for the U.S. involved U.S. B-52 bombers, F-15 fighter jets, and A-10 attack planes. But “I think we’re going to find that we’ve been pretty successful,” Secretary Austin said. 

The collapse of Syrian and Russian air defenses means the U.S. and its allies do “not need the elaborate preparations and countermeasures that were needed before,” says retired Col. Mark Cancian, a senior adviser in the Defense and Security Department of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. 

While U.S. forces are concentrated in the northeast of Syria, the fighting by HTS has primarily taken place in the west and southwest of the country. But as HTS consolidates its control, the rebel group will “bump into these U.S. forces,” Colonel Cancian predicts.

So far, the U.S. military hasn’t communicated directly with HTS, though it has “counterparts and other groups that have ways of delivering messages,” Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh told reporters Monday.

More immediately, the Defense Department is focused on helping ensure that chemical weapons produced by the Assad regime “don’t fall into the hands of anyone that would want to use them against civilians, or against our partners in the region,” she said. “We have expertise in this issue.” 

Troop tripwire

The U.S. military was eyeing stepped-up ISIS hostilities this summer.

The U.S.-designated terrorist group had doubled its attacks on U.S. and allied forces to 153 in Iraq and Syria between 2023 and 2024. After being routed in 2017, ISIS was trying to grow again, U.S. Central Command officials warned.

Commanders gave a rundown of the U.S. military’s response: The “Defeat ISIS Mission” carried out 59 operations with Kurdish-led Syrian Defense Forces (SDF) in the first half of 2024, killing 14 ISIS operatives and detaining 92.

Today, there are roughly 2,500 ISIS fighters still “at large” across Iraq and Syria, according to Central Command. When not rooting out people identified by U.S. intelligence as terrorists, American troops in the country are tasked with helping the SDF protect oil fields in the northeast, a mission first given to the troops by President Donald Trump in 2019. 

Critics at the time called it an American money grab. The prospect of oil revenue for U.S. companies reportedly helped dissuade Mr. Trump from completely withdrawing U.S. forces from Syria.

U.S. officials said the point was denying terrorists and the Assad regime critical cash and resources.

Today oilfield money and control is a key reason the Kurds can govern much of Syria’s northeast. This does not please Turkish leaders, who say Kurdish terrorists use the region to plan attacks on them.

Up until now, U.S. troops on the ground have lent protection to the Kurds, a de facto “tripwire” of sorts, deterring Turkey from attacking America’s Kurdish allies, notes Steven Simon, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. 

The Kurds have been key comrades in arms in the U.S. fight against ISIS and against Al Qaeda in Iraq. What happens to them matters to many U.S. veterans of these wars and others.

Among them – most notably the late Sen. John McCain – there has long been a “romanticized image of Kurds as daring fighters fending off terrorist hordes to spare the U.S. an onerous burden,” notes Mr. Miller, who served as the National Security Council senior director for the Middle East under President Barack Obama.

When Turkey took advantage of chaos created by the Assad regime’s collapse to fire on Kurdish forces Dec. 7, killing at least 22 SDF troops, Secretary Austin got his Turkish counterpart on the phone.

They agreed on the need “to prevent further escalation of an already volatile situation, as well as to avoid any risk to U.S. forces and partners,” according to a Pentagon readout of the call. 

Whether the Kurds will inspire the same loyalty in the incoming Trump administration that they have historically garnered with American administrations is unclear. Mr. Trump “does absolutely support the Kurds,” House Intelligence Committee Chair Mike Turner, an Ohio Republican, told CBS News on Sunday.

At the same time, the president-elect will embark on “an assessment as to whether or not" U.S. troops should stay in Syria and “make clear … that any threat to U.S. troops will be unbelievably responded to,” Representative Turner said during the broadcast.

On this, Pentagon officials agree, particularly as they grapple with lingering concern that skirmishes between Turkish-backed militias and the SDF could create enough confusion for ISIS to hatch prison breaks, bolstering their ranks. 

For now, U.S. troops have the job of helping the SDF guard the 9,000 ISIS prisoners still in Syrian detention centers, along with 43,000 displaced persons awaiting return from camps in the northeast.

Next door, the pending U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq has been emboldening attacks on U.S. forces in Syria, defense officials say. It’s an effort, they add, to pressure America to leave the country for good.