Al Bu Kamal operation — success or failure?

Beirut: A US-backed operation was launched this week from Jordan aimed at re-taking the strategic Syrian town of Al Bu Kamal from Daesh. Not only did the Syrian rebels, known as the New Syrian Army, fail to retake Al Bu Kamal, but walked straight into the hands of Daesh. Out of 200 fighters, 15 were apprehended and 40 were killed while others fled into the Syrian Desert.

Syrians on both sides of the civil war were astonished on Wednesday as news of a Jordanian-backed military operation surfaced near the Syrian-Iraqi border, carried out by the little-known “New Syrian Army.” Neither the Syrian government and its Russian allies nor Turkish-backed troops of the Syrian north were informed that such a force existed, let alone was ready for battle, despite being on the CIA payroll since last October.

In Damascus, state-run media gloated at what they called the “Al Bu Kamal fiasco,” while members of the Syrian opposition took swings at the Obama Administration, claiming that its support was always too little, too late, complaining that the United States was clearly more interested at this stage on combating Daesh than in bringing down the Syrian regime.

Al Bu Kamal remains in the hands of Daesh and there are contradicting reports on the fate of the nearby Hamdan airbase. A spokesman for New Syrian Army and the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Wednesday that the rebels seized the base near the Iraqi border. Russian media is claiming it has fallen to the rebels, while Iran-backed sources say that Daesh has been forced out.

The offensive on Al Bu Kamal is aimed at cutting the terrorists’ self-declared caliphate into two.

Daesh’s capture of Al Bu Kamal in 2014 effectively erased the border between Syria and Iraq. Losing it would be a huge symbolic and strategic blow to the cross-border “caliphate” led by Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi.

On Wednesday night, approximately 200 US-trained Syrian troops were parachuted on Al Bu Kamal, a strategic city on the Euphrates, occupied by Daesh since 2014. They took off from within Jordanian territory aboard Lockheed C-130 Hercules military transport carriers provided by the US Army. US air cover was on standby, prepared to protect them as they overran the Hamdan Military Airport in the suburbs of Al Bu Kamal.

The operation fell in line with a full-scale American effort to take Manbij in the Syrian north, after Iraqi troops recaptured Fallujah from Daesh earlier this month and while Russia and its allies were marching toward Al Raqqa on the northern bank of the Euphrates.

The Obama Administration hopes to take full-control of the Syrian-Jordanian-Iraqi Triangle, setting up a bridge for military coordination between Kurdish troops in northeast Syria and Arab tribes in the southeast, all on the payroll of the United States.

The Al Bu Kamal Operation was indeed a disaster, however, because of two main reasons. One was that the Americans mistakenly believed that residents of Al Bu Kamal would flock to support the invading troops of the “New Syrian Army”. Because the new militia was packed with members of Sunni Arab Syrian tribes, the Americans thought that they would rally support in the fight against Daesh, forgetting that Al Bu Kamal had been an incubator for Islamist militants who took up arms in the battles of Al Anbar shortly after the US occupation of Iraq in 2003.

A large proportion of its youth, over 50 per cent of the city’s 200,000 residents, refused to take up arms with the New Syrian Army, and nor did the Iraqi refugees in Al Bu Kamal who recently arrived from Fallujah, or the Syrian ones from Deir Al Zour who have been living in Al Bu Kamal for two years now.

Simply put, they looked the other way as Daesh slaughtered 40 parachuters and took fighters prisoner. Dozens fled into the Syrian Desert, seeking refuge with civilians.

Pro-regime analysts believe that another reason for the operation’s “failure” was because the Russians were not part of it. For its part, Daesh claimed that the operation failed because its intelligence had discovered an espionage unit in Al Bu Kamal working for the New Syrian Army, composed of four young Syrians who were immediately decapitated, allegedly at the orders of the self-proclaimed caliph Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi.

The New Syrian Army were founded and trained by the CIA in October 2015. Originally drawn from the US-backed Division 30 of the Free Syrian Army, there power base numbered 10,000 (namely Sunni tribes that overlapped between Syria and Iraq) and were trained on combating Daesh rather than the government troops of Bashar Al Assad.