American defense officials with knowledge of Special Operations Forces activities in Syria are concerned that their secrets may fall into the hands of the Russians, as the Kurds switch their allegiance to the Moscow-backed Syrian government.
Members of the
United States Special Operations Forces and the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) have had a presence in Kurdish-dominated northern Syria
since
at least 2012.
Following the rise of the Islamic State in 2014, the Americans have
worked closely with the Kurds in battling the Islamist group throughout
the region.
Throughout
that time, US Special Operations Forces have trained members of the
Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a political and military umbrella of
anti-government Syrian groups, which is led by the Kurdish-dominated
People’s Protection Unit (YPG) militias. Until recently, the SDF and the
YPG were almost exclusively funded, trained and armed by the US through
its Special Operations Forces units on the ground in northern Syria. US
Special Operations Forces were also behind the creation in 2014 of the
SDF’s most feared force, the Anti-Terror Units. Known in Kurdish as Yekîneyên Antî Teror, these units have been trained by the US in paramilitary operations and are tasked with targeting Islamic State sleeper cells.
As of this
week, however, the SDF and all of its US-trained militias have switched
their allegiance to the Russia-backed government of Syrian President
Bashar al-Assad. The dramatic move followed the decision of the White
House earlier this month to pull its Special Operations Forces troops
from norther Syria, effectively allowing the Turkish military to invade
the region. According
to the American defense news website Military Times, US Pentagon
officials are now worried that the SDF may surrender to the Russians a
long list of secrets relating to US Special Operations Forces’ “tactics,
techniques, procedures, equipment, intelligence gathering and even
potentially names of operators”.
One former US defense official told
The Military Times that SDF “may be in survival mode and will need to
cut deals with bad actors” by surrendering US secrets. Another source
described this scenario as “super problematic” and a symptom of the
absence of a genuine American strategy in the wider Middle East region.
The website also cited US Marines Major Fred Galvin (ret.), who said
that Special Operations Forces tend to reveal little about themselves
and their capabilities when working with non-US actors. However, this is
uncharted territory for them, said Galvin, since “we’ve never had a
force completely defect to an opposition like this before”.
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