Airstrikes by the United States and its allies against two
Syrian army positions Sept. 17 killed at least 62 Syrian troops and wounded
dozens more. The attack was quickly treated as a non-story by the U.S. news
media; U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) claimed the strikes were carried out in
the mistaken belief that Islamic State forces were being targeted, and the
story disappeared.
The circumstances surrounding
the attack, however, suggested it may have been deliberate, its purpose being
to sabotage President Obama’s policy of coordinating with Russia against
Islamic State and Nusra Front forces in Syria as part of a U.S.-Russian
cease-fire agreement.
Normally the U.S. military can
cover up illegal operations and mistakes with a pro forma military
investigation that publicly clears those responsible. But the air attack on
Syrian troops also involved three foreign allies in the anti-Islamic State
campaign named Operation Inherent Resolve: the United Kingdom, Denmark and
Australia. So, the Pentagon had to agree to bring a general from one of those
allies into the investigation as a co-author of the report. Consequently, the summary of the investigation released by CENTCOM on
Nov. 29 reveals far more than the Pentagon and CENTCOM brass would have
desired.
Thanks to that heavily
redacted report, we now have detailed evidence that the commander of CENTCOM’s
Air Force component attacked the Syrian army deliberately.
The Motives Behind a Pentagon
Scheme
Secretary of Defense Ashton
Carter and the military establishment had a compelling motive in the attack of
Sept. 17—namely, interest in maintaining the narrative of a “new Cold War” with
Russia, which is crucial to supporting and expanding the budgets of their
institutions. When negotiations on a comprehensive cease-fire agreement with
Russia, including provisions for U.S.-Russian cooperation on air operations
against Islamic State and Nusra Front, appeared to gain traction last spring,
the Pentagon began making leaks to the news media about its opposition to the
Obama policy. Those receiving the leaks included neoconservative hawk Josh Rogin, who had just become a columnist at The
Washington Post.
After Secretary of State John
Kerry struck an agreement Sept. 9 that contained a provision to set up a “Joint
Integration Center” (JIC) for U.S.-Russian cooperation in targeting, the
Pentagon sought to reverse it. Carter grilled Kerry for hours in an effort to force him to
retreat from that provision, according to The New York Times.
Lobbying against the JIC
continued the following week after Obama approved the full agreement. When the
commander of the Central Command’s Air Force component, Lt. Gen. Jeffrey L.
Harrigan, was asked about the JIC at a press briefing Sept. 13, he seemed to
suggest that opponents of the provision were still hoping to avoid cooperating
with the Russians on targeting. He told reporters that his readiness to join
such a joint operation was “going to depend on what the plan ends up being.”
But the Pentagon also had
another motive for hitting Syrian troops in Deir Ezzor. On June 16, Russian
planes attacked a remote outpost of a CIA-supported armed group, called the New
Syrian Army, in Deir Ezzor province near the confluence of Iraq, Syria and
Jordan. The Pentagon demanded an explanation for the attack but never got it.
For senior leaders of the
Pentagon and others in the military, a strike against Syrian army positions in
Deir Ezzor would not only offer the prospect of avoiding the threat of
cooperating with Russia militarily, it would also be payback for what many
believed was a Russian poke in the U.S. eye.
The Evidence in the
Investigation Report
On Sept. 16, Gen. Harrigan,
who also headed the Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC) at al-Udeid airbase
in Qatar, set in motion the planning for the attack on the two Syrian army
positions. The process began, according to the investigation report, on Sept. 16, when
Harrigan’s command identified two fighting positions near the Deir Ezzor
airport as belonging to Islamic State, based on drone images showing that the
personnel there were not wearing uniform military garb and, supposedly,
displayed no flags.
But, as a former intelligence
analyst told me, that was not a legitimate basis for a positive identification
of the sites as Islamic State-controlled because Syrian army troops in the
field frequently wear a wide range of uniforms and civilian clothing.
The report contains the
incriminating revelation that the authorities at CAOC had plenty of
intelligence warning that its identification was flat wrong. Before the strike,
the regional station of the Distributed Common Ground System, which is the Air
Force’s primary intelligence organ for interpreting data from aerial
surveillance, contested the original identification of the units, sending its
own assessment that they could not possibly be Islamic State. Another
pre-strike intelligence report, moreover, pointed to what appeared to be a flag
at one of the two sites. And a map of the area that was available to
intelligence analysts at CAOC clearly showed that the sites were occupied by
the Syrian army. Harrigan and his command apparently claimed, implausibly, that
they were unaware of any of this information.
Further evidence that Harrigan
meant to strike Syrian army targets was the haste with which the strike was
carried out, the day after the initial intelligence assessment was made. The
investigation summary acknowledges that the decision to go ahead with a strike
so soon after the target had been initially assessed was a violation of Air
Force regulations.
It had started out as a
“deliberate target development” process—one that did not require an immediate
decision and could therefore allow for a more careful analysis of intelligence.
That was because the targets were clearly fixed ground positions, so there was
no need for an immediate strike. Nevertheless, the decision was made to change
it to a “dynamic targeting process,” normally reserved for situations in which
the target is moving, to justify an immediate strike on Sept. 17.
No one in Harrigan’s command,
including the commander himself, would acknowledge having made that decision.
That would have been a tacit admission that the attack was far more than an
innocent mistake.
The Deir Ezzor strike appears
to have been timed to provoke a breakdown of the cease-fire before the JIC
could be formed, which was originally to be after seven days of effective
truce—meaning Sept. 19. Obama added a requirement for the completion of
humanitarian shipments from the Turkish border, but the opponents of the JIC
could not count on the Syrian government continuing to hold up the truck
convoys. That meant that Harrigan would need to move urgently to carry out the
strike.
Perhaps the single most
damaging piece of evidence that the strike was knowingly targeting Syrian army
bases is the fact that Harrigan’s command sent the Russians very specific
misleading information on the targets of the operation. It informed its Russian
contact under the deconfliction agreement that the two targets were nine
kilometers south of Deir Ezzor airfield, but in fact they were only three and
six kilometers away, respectively, according to the summary. Accurate
information about the locations would have set off alarm bells among the
Russians, because they would have known immediately that Syrian army bases were
being targeted, as the U.S. co-author of the investigation report, Gen. Richard
Coe, acknowledged to reporters.
“Who is in charge in
Washington?”
Gen. Harrigan’s strike worked
like a charm in terms of the interests of those behind it. The hope of
provoking a Syrian-Russian decision to end the cease-fire and thus the plan for
the JIC was apparently based on the assumption that it would be perceived by
both Russians and Syrians as evidence that Obama was not in control of U.S.
policy and therefore could not be trusted as a partner in managing the
conflict. That assumption proved correct. When Russia’s ambassador to the
United Nations, Vitaly Churkin, spoke to reporters at a press briefing outside
a U.N. Security Council emergency meeting on the U.S. attack on Syrian troops,
he asked rhetorically, “Who is in charge in Washington? The White House or the
Pentagon?”
Seemingly no longer convinced
that Obama was in control of his own military in Syria, Russian President
Vladimir Putin pulled the plug on his U.S. strategy. Two days after the
attacks, Syria announced, with obvious Russian support, that the cease-fire was
no longer in effect.
The political-diplomatic
consequences for Syrians and for the United States, however, were severe. The
Russian and Syrian air forces began a campaign of heavy airstrikes in Aleppo
that became the single focus of media attention on Syria. In mid-December,
Secretary of State Kerry recalled in an interview with The Boston Globe that he had
had an agreement with the Russians that would have given the United States “a
veto over their flights. …” He lamented that “you’d have a different situation
there now if we’d been able to do that.”
But it didn’t happen, Kerry
noted, because “we had people in our government who were bitterly opposed to
doing that.” What he didn’t say was that those people had the power and the
audacity to frustrate the will of the president of the United States.
Gareth Porter is an
independent investigative journalist and winner of the 2012 Gellhorn Prize for
journalism. He is the author of the newly published “Manufactured Crisis: The
Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.”
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