The New York Times reports that the United States has quietly been losing allies in the fight against ISIS in Syria and Iraq:
AL UDEID AIR BASE, Qatar — As the United States prepares to intensify airstrikes against the Islamic State in Syria, the Arab allies who with great fanfare sent warplanes on the initial missions there a year ago have largely vanished from the campaign.
The Obama administration heralded the Arab air forces flying side by side with American fighter jets in the campaign’s early days as an important show of solidarity against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or Daesh. Top commanders like Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, who oversees operations in Syria and Iraq, still laud the Arab countries’ contributions to the fight. But as the United States enters a critical phase of the war in Syria, ordering Special Operations troops to support rebel forces and sending two dozen attack planes to Turkey, the air campaign has evolved into a largely American effort.
Administration officials had sought to avoid the appearance of another American-dominated war, even as most leaders in the Persian Gulf seem more preoccupied with supporting rebels fighting the government of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. Now, some of those officials note with resignation, the Arab partners have quietly left the United States to run the bulk of the air war in Syria — not the first time Washington has found allies wanting.
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have shifted most of their aircraft to their fight against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen. Jordan, reacting to the grisly execution of one of its pilots by the Islamic State, and in a show of solidarity with the Saudis, has also diverted combat flights to Yemen. Jets from Bahrain last struck targets in Syria in February, coalition officials said. Qatar is flying patrols over Syria, but its role has been modest.
“They’ve all been busy doing other things, Yemen being the primary draw,” Lt. Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., who leads the air war from a $60 million command center at this sprawling base in Qatar, said of the Arab allies. He added that those allies still fly periodic missions in Syria and allow American jets to use their bases.
The United Arab Emirates last carried out strikes in Syria in March; Jordan in August; and Saudi Arabia in September, according to information provided by allied officials last week. But the Arab allies insist they are still playing an essential, if less active, military role in the war.
“Jordan’s commitment to this fight is unwavering,” said Dana Zureikat Daoud, a spokeswoman for the Jordanian Embassy in Washington. “We remain an active partner and contributor to the international coalition, and continue to conduct airstrikes against Daesh targets.”
The engagement of Western allies, like France and Australia, has also been limited. They have conducted a smattering of strikes in Syria, but have reserved most of their firepower for Islamic State targets in Iraq. Canada’s new prime minister, Justin Trudeau, has promised to fulfill his campaign pledge to end Ottawa’s role in the air campaign altogether. And none of the Western allies appear eager to join the United State in basing warplanes at Incirlik air base in Turkey, a move that would make it easier to increase strikes against militants in northern Syria and Iraq.
So far, eight Arab and Western allies have conducted about 5 percent of the 2,700 airstrikes in Syria, compared with 30 percent of the 5,100 strikes in Iraq, where many NATO partners also fly missions against the Islamic State. But the United States was always likely to fly the majority of the missions in Syria, as it does in Iraq, since its air forces are much larger than those of the Arab states or any forces deployed by Western allies.
The reluctance of American allies to get further involved also includes a reluctance to put their forces any closer to Syria and Iraq than they already are even though doing so would make strikes easier and cheaper:
Incirlik is far more convenient to the fight — 15 minutes flight time to the Syrian border compared with nearly five hours from Persian Gulf bases — making it easier to increase the number of planes that can spend more time hunting Islamic State targets. But Australia and most of the European allies are reluctant to leave their bases in the Middle East, despite the shorter flight times.
“It’s not just as simple as, ‘go to Turkey,’ ” Gen. John R. Allen, the special American envoy to the coalition fighting the Islamic State, told Congress last month. “They’ve got bilateral relationships in the gulf that are old, and have been cultivated in order for them to deploy.”
So while France will still conduct airstrikes in Syria — it has carried out about 270 strikes in Iraq and Syria over all, though only two so far in eastern Syria, a senior French official said — it will continue to fly out of Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, at least for now. The Australians will continue F/A-18 combat missions over Syria that began on Sept. 11, expanding beyond strikes in Iraq. But they, too, do not want to give up their base in the United Arab Emirates.
Britain has talked tough about going after the Islamic State, but unlike France, its actions have not matched its talk. Britain currently flies bombing missions over Iraq and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance flights over Syria.
The British defense and foreign secretaries have said they want forces to be able to fight the Islamic State in Syria as well as in Iraq, and that it is absurd to stop planes at a border that the militant group does not recognize, especially since its command centers are in Syria. But stung by Britain’s experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan in support of American wars, Prime Minister David Cameron has promised to seek the approval of Parliament before taking any military action in Syria. He has said that he will only press for such a vote if he has “a clear majority” in favor, and so far he has failed to find one.
On some level, of course, the fact that the United States is shouldering most of the burden in the fight against ISIS is neither surprising nor unusual. Even in past recent conflicts such as the Persian Gulf War, the War in Afghanistan, or even the Iraq War, where we were joined by allies whether it be a handful in Iraq or dozens in the Persian Gulf War, it was always the United States that was providing most of the men, material, and planning for military action. It’s also been true of NATO from the beginning of the alliance and was largely true of the Western Front in Europe and the Pacific Theater during World War II. This is what happens when one is the overwhelming military power on the planet and the most powerful member of the coalition. Nonetheless, when we start seeing members of a coalition drop off from even the minor level of participation that they had been engaging in it starts to call the entire endeavor into question. Yes, the small contributions that nations like Canada, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates have been making to the effort can and will likely easily be made up by U.S. forces, but that’s not really the point. When the fight itself start shifting from being an international coalition in which the United States is the senior partner to one where it is basically just the United States, the political nature of the fight arguably changes. Having an international coalition, especially one that includes Arab and Muslim nations, helps lend a certain air of credibility to U.S. policy in the region. With that slipping away, the old propaganda arguments about American imperialism may suddenly start to resonate with civilians mostly concerned with surviving while bombs fall around them,
The interesting question going forward, of course, is what impact last weekend’s crash of a Russian passenger jet in the Sinai Peninsula, which U.S. intelligence said earlier this week was looking more and more likely as having been cause by a bomb may have on all of this. As things stand right now, there is not yet any definitive conclusion about what caused the plane to go down with the loss of all lives on board. Both The New York Times and CNN are reporting, though, that investigators are increasingly focusing on evidence that points to the probability of a bomb or other explosion having been the cause of the crash. Even the Russians, who had spent most of the past two days dismissing the reports about a bomb seem to be coming around on this point, as evidence by the announcement that all flights between Egypt and Russia had been suspended until further notice, apparently due to security concerns. If it is confirmed that the plane was brought down by a bomb, and that bomb can be linked to an ISIS-linked group in the Sinai, then it has the potential to change the game on the ground significantly. Notwithstanding whatever differences the United States and Russia may have about the future of Syria, for example, both nations have an obvious interest in international air security, as does pretty much every other nation that has been involved in some way in the U.S. coalition. The prospect that ISIS may now be able to get bombs on airplanes increases the risk they pose to the rest of the world significantly, and that may be enough to change the way that some of the nations that have sat on the sidelines so far approach the situation. For the time being at least, though, the fight against ISIS is pretty much just a U.S. effort and the coalition that the President has touted in the past basically just exists in name only.
