Syria Drone Shootdown Puts Spotlight on US Mission

U.S. troops have been in Syria for eight years, officially on a mission to combat the Islamic State (ISIS) terrorist group. But an incident on Thursday suggested that’s not the whole story: a U.S. fighter jet shot down a Turkish drone in northeast Syria, saying the drone had been hovering over American special operations forces.

Increasingly, the 900 Americans deployed to Syria are in the midst of a highly complex and combustible region where multiple state and non-state armed groups are vying for control and influence–and where the lines between allies and enemies are not always clear. And while the U.S. maintains that the relatively small deployment in Syria is necessary to keep ISIS at bay, there are ongoing questions about its future, and whether the mission itself is even legal. 

Fighting ISIS...

In October 2015, President Barack Obama ordered the deployment of 50 U.S. special operations troops to Syria to fight ISIS alongside Kurdish rebels, reversing a promise not to put “American boots on the ground” in a country where a devastating civil war has raged since 2011. Two years later, the number of troops had grown to 2,000. President Donald Trump said several times he wanted to remove U.S. troops from Syria, particularly after U.S. and Kurdish forces took the last territory held by ISIS’s “caliphate” in 2019, but his administration ultimately left about half of them in place.

Today, those 900 U.S. troops remain in Syria, not including an undisclosed number of private contractors and special operations forces who cycle in and out of the country. The troops are stationed at bases in Northeast Syria, in a region controlled by the predominantly Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), but the U.S. also has a garrison at al-Tanf, near the Iraqi and Jordanian borders. 

While ISIS today is much less active and powerful than it was a decade ago, the fight against the group continues. In August, the last month for which the U.S. Central Command has provided data, the U.S. claimed to have carried out eight anti-ISIS operations alongside its local partners, killing one ISIS operative and capturing seven more. The SDF also operates a prison where thousands of ISIS fighters are detained in Northeast Syria, which was briefly taken over by ISIS in a battle last year. 

“ISIS is not claiming a lot of attacks at the moment, but they're still very active,” Brian Carter, an analyst with the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project, told The Messenger. 

Carter said the militants have more of a presence in areas of central Syria that are under the government’s control, but that “without the SDF and the United States containing ISIS in northeastern Syria, it could quite easily spill over there as well.”

...but not only ISIS

On Thursday, after the U.S. shot down the Turkish drone, the Pentagon’s press secretary, General Patrick Ryder, told reporters that U.S. troops remain in Syria “exclusively in support of the campaign to defeat ISIS.” In recent years, however, military commanders and senior officials have also said that the U.S. presence is useful for countering Iranian influence. 

A number of Iranian-backed backed militias are active in Syria, where they have fought on behalf of Bashar al-Assad’s regime. U.S. forces and these groups once had a mutual enemy in ISIS, but since the caliphate’s decline, the militias have increasingly turned their fire on the U.S. 

The U.S. has blamed “Iran-supported malign actors” for some 80 attacks on U.S. forces in Syria in the last several years. In March, a drone strike on a U.S. base killed a U.S. contractor and wounded five troops, prompting the U.S. to launch airstrikes on Iran-linked targets in response.  

Russian troops, both regular military and private military contractors, have also played a major role on the ground in Syria, on the Assad regime’s behalf. In one 2018 incident, the U.S. launched airstrikes on joint Russian and Syrian regime forces approaching their position, killing as many as 200-300 mercenaries linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group. More recently, several close encounters between U.S. and Russian aircraft over Syria have raised concerns of an inadvertent clash while tensions are running high over the war in Ukraine.

The Turkey factor

The biggest complicating factor for the U.S. mission in Syria may be America’s NATO ally Turkey. Since the height of the war against ISIS, Kurdish forces have been the main U.S. partner on the ground. With U.S. support, the Kurdish dominated SDF has built a semi-autonomous mini-state with its own government. 

The problem is that these Kurdish forces are historically and ideologically aligned with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), an outlawed separatist group that has fought a bloody, decades-long insurgency against the Turkish state. The Turkish government views the two groups as essentially one and the same–though Syrian Kurdish authorities deny this–and accuses the U.S. of abetting a terrorist organization. 

Turkey also sees the establishment of an autonomous Kurdish enclave in Syria, on its southern border, as unacceptable. It launched a major military incursion into Syria in 2019 to push the SDF back from the border and frequently carries out airstrikes in the region.

The most recent flashpoint came last weekend when the PKK took responsibility for a terrorist bombing in the Turkish capital, Ankara. The Turkish government claims the perpetrators came from Northeast Syria and launched a series of airstrikes across the border in response. Some of these strikes took place within an area the U.S. military had declared a “restricted operating zone,” which led to the downing of the drone on Thursday. 

Sinam Mohamad, the Washington representative for the Syrian Democratic Council, the SDF’s political wing, told The Messenger that the SDF had no involvement in the Ankara attack. “It is an internal issue in Turkey, they have to solve it,” she said. She also said that in its retaliatory strikes, Turkey is “not targeting the military bases, they are targeting civilians, water stations, factories.”

Mohamad said the clashes will negatively affect the counterterrorism mission in the region. “Of course, the SDF is committed to fight ISIS, but if these attacks continue, they will not be able to fight ISIS. They will have to fight Turkey, and ISIS will find the opportunity to reemerge.”

Questions for the U.S. mission

Beyond these complications, there’s also the question of whether the U.S. mission is even legal.

Three successive U.S. presidential administrations have argued that the U.S. military presence in Syria is justified under the 2001 authorization for the use of military force (AUMF) targeting the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks and any states that aid them. This argument was controversial from the start: ISIS may have started as an offshoot of al-Qaeda, but by 2015, the two groups were sworn enemies. Brian Finucane, a former State Department legal adviser now with the International Crisis Group, says it has only become more tenuous over time. 

“Even if you accept that ISIS is within the scope of the AUMF, there’s still the question of whether it’s still necessary today to use force against them to prevent acts of terrorism against the United States,” Finucane told The Messenger. “Based on recent threat assessments, the threat posed by ISIS to the U.S. homeland seems pretty diminished.”

Apart from ISIS, the framers of the original 2001 authorization and members of congress who voted for it probably never imagined clashes with Syrian, Iranian, Russian or even Turkish forces falling within its scope. 

For all these complications, the mission appears unlikely to end any time soon. 900 is a relatively small number of troops (the U.S. has more in Niger.) And even if the terrorist threat is diminished, U.S. leaders likely don’t want to repeat the experience of the Obama administration, which removed troops from Iraq in 2011, only to redeploy them four years later in response to the explosive growth of ISIS. The small U.S. troop presence also protects the Kurdish allies that fought alongside the U.S. against ISIS from being swept away by Turkey or the Syrian regime. 

“The whole U.S. policy toward Syria is basically on autopilot, with administrations kicking the can down the road to avoid tough decisions,” Finucane said.

But while the mission may continue due to U.S. interests or just inertia, this week’s events have shown that U.S. forces will likely continue to be drawn into clashes in Syria, far removed from their original mission in the country.