If ISIS remains viable, it will eventually strike on US soil. America’s best bet, perhaps its only bet, for preventing that is to go after the terror group in Syria as well as Iraq — and to do so in partnership with the moderate rebels in Syria.
Of course, the White House is far from any such strategy. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Martin Dempsey recently said ISIS is mainly a regional threat to US interests, and he may be right for now.
But if ISIS can surge its recruitment here, as it most certainly has ambitions to, then it will fast metastasize into a threat to every American. An ISIS representative in Syria has already expressed the group’s desire to “raise the flag of Allah at the White House.”
Douglas McAuthur McCain, the US citizen recently killed while fighting for ISIS, was only one of over a hundred Americans who’ve reportedly joined ISIS.
Some Western-raised fighters will inevitably return home as radicalized, proficient killers who know how to fit in at any shopping mall, sports stadium or tourist site. Men like these can transform from regional threats to domestic terror threats in the course of an airplane ride.
No amount of action in Iraq will end the ISIS threat to the US homeland. To address the threat from Syria, Obama should dramatically expand collaboration with the moderate Syrian rebels who are fighting ISIS and the Assad regime.
ISIS in Syria is not the same as ISIS in Iraq. In Iraq, ISIS has at least some popular support from disaffected Sunnis.
In Syria, nearly all ISIS victories have come at the expense of rebels who oppose President Bashar al-Assad.
And ISIS has sought to consolidate its “caliphate” by targeting civilians who espouse a different vision. Syrians view ISIS as a hostile occupying army, and have responded accordingly.
On Jan. 3, Syrians in opposition areas held massive protests against ISIS abuses. Within three days, moderate rebels had formed new anti-ISIS coalitions to rout ISIS from northwestern Syria.
The rebels beat ISIS again in July outside Damascus, and popular protests and guerrilla attacks against ISIS are ongoing in eastern Syria.
Syrian rebels did all this without US air support. Indeed, they were often under fierce bombardment by Assad forces even as they were rolling back ISIS.
Arming Syria’s rebels is the common-sense choice, and indeed, no other US option stands a chance of removing ISIS’s Syrian sanctuaries before they begin exporting extremists back to America.
As Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has warned, airstrikes in Iraq have only “stalled” ISIS, which is well able to “regroup and stage an offensive.”
In a way, these limited strikes actually supercharge ISIS recruitment, by allowing the group to claim it survived against the US without being dealt a major blow.
Proposals for US collaboration with Assad against ISIS, often marketed as “realistic,” are flights of fancy. First, most ISIS territory in Syria hasn’t seen a regime troop patrol in two years. Assad could only bomb from the air, and we know ISIS can handle that. The US needs partners on the ground.
Second, the regime has played footsie with the jihadis of ISIS and al Qaeda in Iraq for a decade.
In 2008, the Combatting Terrorism Center concluded that Assad had for years “willingly ignored, and possibly abetted, foreign fighters headed to Iraq.”
This January, as Syrian rebels fought ISIS near the group’s headquarters, Assad bombed the rebels while leaving ISIS positions untouched.
After Mosul fell, Assad and ISIS conducted a de facto joint siege against opposition forces in eastern Syria. Even now, Assad and ISIS forces in northern Syria are less than two miles apart in some locations, but don’t confront each other.
Instead, they are advancing in parallel on the main Syrian rebel stronghold.
Despite recent strikes on ISIS once Western cameras were rolling, Assad’s record shows clearly that he is not a reliable or capable ally against terrorism.
And America has much to lose through working with Assad. ISIS has achieved prodigious global recruiting success by claiming solidarity with Muslims victimized by Assad. US collaboration with Assad would be the ultimate gift to ISIS recruiters, especially in the West.
Eliminating ISIS requires working with those in Syria who have the best record against ISIS: the mainstream Syrian rebels. They’re not on the verge of extinction, but gaining in many parts of Syria.
The combined forces of the Kurdish anti-Assad brigades, anti-ISIS brigades in northern Syria, moderate rebels in the south and the anti-ISIS coalition outside Damascus easily exceeds 60,000 fighters, while ISIS numbers at most 50,000 fighters in Syria and Iraq.
President Obama has already decided that he doesn’t need to ask Assad’s permission to strike in Syria.
In July, he sent special forces into Syria to try to rescue James Foley from ISIS. He’s also authorized drone flights over Syria to gather intelligence on ISIS positions and movements.
Once this intelligence is gathered, the president should authorize immediate airstrikes on ISIS positions and provide advanced weaponry to moderate rebels spearheading the fight against both ISIS and Assad.
Mohammed Alaa Ghanem is senior political adviser for the Syrian American Council, a board member of the Coalition for a Democratic Syria and a fellow at the Syrian Center for Political and Strategic Studies.