The Other War In Aleppo

Edited by Sam Thielman

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THE SHOCKING SEIZURE OF ALEPPO BY THE ISLAMIST militia Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) over the weekend had me glued to my phone. All the attention granted to this major challenge to the post-2020 status quo in Syria is deserved. Yet it has overshadowed a knock-on development with serious implications for the United States, which is already deeply involved in a different-but-inevitably-intermingled Middle East war. 

HTS, which began life as a Syrian al-Qaeda affiliate before renouncing the wheezing jihadist movement, took Aleppo in coalition with another Sunni Islamist militia, the Syrian National Army (SNA). Despite calling itself the "Syrian National Army," the SNA is Turkey's proxy force. Accordingly, its focus is not only on the regime of Bashar Assad but on the Kurdish quasi-state mostly on the eastern side of the Euphrates River. (More on that "mostly" part in a second.) 

Variously known as Rojava, the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria or, in U.S. parlance, the "Eastern Syria Security Area," the quasi-state is controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces, the Kurdish force that is the U.S. proxy in Syria against the so-called Islamic State. While not official U.S. policy, the 900 or so U.S. troops stationed in the east are a bulwark that tacitly helps guarantee the viability of the quasi-state, even though it dealt with a major Turkish incursion in 2019 that Donald Trump pretty much greenlit. Whatever tenuous peace has held between the Assad/Russia, Turkish-backed and independent Islamist militia forces since 2020, Kurdish territory in both Syria and Iraq is subject to Turkish aerial bombardment. In late October, SDF commander Mazloum Abdi pleaded for international mediation and warned of what the AP paraphrased as "a broader strategy by Turkey to force a demographic shift by pushing Kurdish residents out of the area."

Instead, the Kurds watched over the weekend from Rojava as the SNA gained a foothold in Syria's second city. Not only is there a Kurdish population in Aleppo, but to the north is Tel Rifaat, where the Kurdish militant group PKK—which Turkey considers a terrorist group and whose Syrian affiliate is the core of the SDF—has a presence. That area is "so close to Turkish-controlled areas, it is completely within [the SNA's] reach," Crisis Group analyst Dareen Khalifa told the FT on Saturday. It's also "a strategic axis sitting at the intersection of Aleppo and the Kurdish-held zone," in the words of al-Monitor reporter Amberin Zaman.

So the Kurds undertook their own operation in Aleppo—a major out-of-area operation staged from their U.S.-protected territory. (The "borders" of Rojava have obviously changed a lot, but I mean that Kurdish soldiers campaigned substantially west of the Euphrates, in territory that very recently was controlled by Assad and is now in the hands of Rojava's adversaries.) The SDF quickly took Aleppo's Kuweires airport. Its commander, Abdi, described the operation as necessary to protect the Kurdish populations in Aleppo city and Tel Rifaat by "establish[ing] a humanitarian corridor between [them and] our eastern regions… with the aim of protecting our people from potential massacres."

It's not clear to me if the SNA moved in response to the SDF deployment or if it counted on the SDF deployment as inevitable after the lightning-fast collapse of Aleppo. Either way, the SNA interpreted Abdi's declaration as a "plan to establish a terror corridor between Tel Rifaat and northeastern Syria" and launched what it calls "Operation Dawn of Freedom." It swiftly captured Kuweires airport from the SDF and they marched on Tel Rifaat, taking some or all of the city. It's worth noting that HTS is marching south to Hama, held by Assad, while the SNA is marching northeast, to cities held by the Kurds. 

"Operation Dawn of Freedom" is unlikely to stop in Tel Rifaat. Zaman wrote Sunday that if the Turkish-backed SNA takes the city, "Turkey will be closer to its long-held objective of wresting Manbij, the sole major town held by the SDF on the western bank of the Euphrates River." On Sunday, the SDF declared what Zaman called "a general mobilization." That same day, the SDF announced three casualties in clashes with "Turkish mercenaries" some undetermined place west of the Euphrates.

To understand this latest rapidly evolving and escalating situation between proxy forces of two NATO allies, I contacted a source of mine, a retired U.S. military officer with substantial experience with the SDF. The ex-officer fully expects the SNA to move from Tel Rifaat to Manbij. And the SDF will fight to hold Manbij, which is on the east-west M4 highway, a major commercial route that connects the oil fields of the east to the Mediterranean, and which has changed hands several times during the Syrian civil war. For just north of Manbij is Kobani, the Kurdish city just south of the border with Turkey that the SDF fought hard to take from ISIS a decade ago. If Manbij falls, Kobani will be in immediate danger from the SNA, and perhaps from Turkish airpower from the north. 

The ex-officer warned that the SDF will "vigorously" defend Kobani, "down to the last man or woman."

THE EARLY STATEMENTS FROM THE U.S. HAVE BEEN CALLS FOR DEESCALATION. Neither U.S. Central Command nor the Pentagon responded to my questions about any advance warning the SDF, which is substantially funded by the United States, provided before moving on Aleppo. The ex-officer said that the U.S. probably had advance notice. 

Beyond that, the accepted rules of the nearly-decade long U.S. patronage of the SDF don't require a green light from the Americans to push west of the Euphrates, the ex-officer said. Nor does the SDF ask permission. Whether the Turks consider the SDF's operations separate from the Kurds' American patron is a different story. 

The formal mission of the U.S. in Syria and with the SDF concerns ISIS. An informal but no less real one is to thwart Iranian power. The battlefield geography of the entrenched Syria conflict has Iranian coalition forces close enough to U.S.-used bases to exchange fire before and during the post-October 7 conflict. According to a Pentagon statement to journalists late last month, of the 206 attacks launched on U.S. forces between October 18, 2023 and November 21, 2024, 125 have been against U.S. positions in Syria. On Monday the Pentagon announced that it had launched a "self-defense" strike in eastern Syria in anticipation of another attack, which it called unrelated to the events of the past four days to the west. "Let me be clear that the US is in no way involved in the operations you see playing out in and around Aleppo in northwestern Syria," Pentagon spokesman Pat Ryder said.

U.S. military forces in Syria won't provide the SDF with logistical or intelligence support for missions unrelated to ISIS, the ex-officer said. But thanks to the U.S., the SDF has substantial military capability deployed to its western frontier. The ex-officer had no doubt that the SDF was using U.S.-provided heavy machine guns and small arms against the SNA. While that might put the SDF in position to challenge the SNA on the ground, the SDF doesn't have air assets or defenses. They've got small drones, and perhaps the PKK has Stinger anti-aircraft missiles. If the Turks get their air force involved in "Operation Dawn of Freedom," the U.S.-backed SDF will be in deep shit. 

On Monday afternoon, the Rojava leadership council issued a statement calling for dialogue, deescalation and a ceasefire. The council "directly holds the Turkish occupation accountable for the recent escalation of violence in northwestern Syria," and urged the international community to take "swift action to protect all Syrian civilians from the imminent threat posed by Turkish-backed groups, which have previously committed war crimes, genocide, and forced displacement."

Whether a real series of SNA-SDF clashes can be prevented is a huge unknown— one of several related to Syria now that HTS has taken Aleppo. The Turkish and Iranian foreign ministers "were unable to bridge their disagreements over Syria in their meeting Monday," al-Monitor reported. 

In that meeting, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said with a straight face, "Trying to explain the events in Syria through external interventions would be a mistake at this stage." At the risk of understatement, while we don't yet know what exactly the various capitals (*coughs* especially Ankara) communicated to their proxy forces, it's glaringly conspicuous that the Islamist capture of Aleppo came right after the (one-sided) ceasefire in Lebanon and before the reeling Iranian coalition that includes Assad has a chance to regroup. Iranian-aligned Iraqi militiamen are now hurriedly deploying to Aleppo to augment Assad's forces against HTS (and perhaps the SNA). And on Monday, Reuters reported that the U.S. and the United Arab Emirates have for months discussed lifting sanctions on Assad—something that would represent the final collapse of the U.S. regime change policy whose viability Russian intervention ended in 2015—in exchange for Assad breaking with Tehran.

For what it's worth, Zaman observed that while the Israelis in the past armed Syrian rebel groups, "There is no evidence to suggest any such coordination between Israel and the HTS-led offensive and, given the meltdown in Turkish-Israeli ties over Gaza, it is hard to envisage how Israel could funnel weapons to them." 

Either way, the re-inflammation of the Syrian civil war unlocks a deeper level of abyss to the Post-October 7 Middle Eastern Regional War. Soon to return to power is Trump, who favored the Turks against the Kurds in 2019, while also not withdrawing U.S. troops from the Kurdish quasi-state in eastern Syria where they remain, despite their presence being illegal under international law. Then as now, Trump's major national security appointments are Iran hawks. (Plus he bombed Assad in 2017.) As we stand on the precipice of a U.S. proxy force going to war with a Turkish proxy force while the U.S.-backed Israelis attempt to press their advantage against the Iranian coalition in the Middle East, a really urgent step to all this from getting much worse—as the Israelis look like they're going to colonize Gaza and annex the West Bank—is to negotiate with Iran. Which is the last thing I expect to happen. 

It's important to remember that before the weekend, it looked like the Syrian civil war had stabilized, similar to how in Washington, Riyadh and elsewhere, it looked before October 7 like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had stabilized. But then as now, neither conflict had resolved any major grievance on the part of combatants (and in the case of Israel, 2023 before October 7 was the most deadly year for Palestinians in a generation). Equilibrium in a conflict is a fleeting thing. Yet, so often, the U.S. is content to substitute it for peace. 

THERE'S A STUNNING AMOUNT in Jane Mayer's New Yorker investigation of Secretary of Defense-nominee Pete Hegseth, to include a drunken chant of "kill all Muslims." But in the spirit of the item above, the wealth of detail risks overshadowing something concerning Hegseth's first act in public life: his work lobbying for escalating the Iraq War in 2007. 

In New York, he met a marine who was working for a small nonprofit organization called Vets for Freedom, which advocated for expanding the war in Iraq. In an interview, one early conservative sympathizer with the group described it to me as essentially an “AstroTurf” organization that had been devised by a handful of big-time political players to look like it was a grassroots veterans’ movement. Hegseth once told a former associate that V.F.F.’s donors included three Republican billionaires who have since passed away: Bernard Marcus, the Home Depot magnate; Jerry Perenchio, the former head of Univision; and Harold Simmons, a Texas entrepreneur. …

The group’s primary donors became concerned that their money was being wasted on inappropriate expenses; there were rumors of parties that “could politely be called trysts,” as the former associate of the group put it. The early sympathizer said, “I was not the first to hear that there was money sloshing around and sexually inappropriate behavior in the workplace.”

Military sexual assault remains an endemic danger. Imagine the green light that abusers in uniform will understand themselves to have with Hegseth at the Pentagon. 

FORMER ISRAELI DEFENSE MINISTER MOSHE "BOGIE" YA'ALON actually said over the weekend: "The path we are being dragged down is occupation, annexation and ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip—population transfer, call it what you want, and Jewish settlements." While the Netanyahu government is treating Ya'alon's statements as a calumny, the incoming U.S. president is threatening Palestinians with the 2024/5 version of Fire and Fury.  

THE WASHINGTON POST IS SEEKING A "LEAD INDUSTRY ANALYST, NATIONAL SECURITY." This doesn't seem to me to be a newsroom position – not least of which because it pays between $170,000 and $320,000 to produce no journalism. Instead it looks like it advises Jeff Bezos on how to profit from the U.S. defense sector: 

This individual will be responsible for shaping and delivering insightful analysis to C-Suite executives, thought leaders and policy influencers via roundtable discussions, written briefs, and comprehensive reports. As an industry thought leader, the Lead Analyst will guide conversations and inform decision-making at the highest levels, while contributing to overall product strategy.

There's so much corruption in U.S. journalism that I wonder if people will even look at this twice. On the other hand, I fit the criteria… [Please subscribe. I need this job.—Sam.]

AS THIS EDITION WENT THROUGH EDITS, the unpopular South Korean president, Yoon Sok Yeol, declared martial law. Yoon's declaration speech is unhinged, from his opening line about "spitting blood" to his accusation that his political opposition are agents of Pyongyang. I do not know enough about Korea to say anything worth your while, and especially not during a rapidly unfolding event. I will simply observe that I learned a lot from Don Oberdorfer and Robert Carlin's The Two Koreas, particularly about the heroic story of South Korea's democracy movement, which had to defeat the U.S.-aligned dictatorship of a Cold War frontline state. FOREVER WARS friend Sarah Jeong is on the scene in Seoul, so follow her Bluesky account. 

WALLER VS. WILDSTORM, the superhero spy thriller I co-wrote with my friend Evan Narcisse and which the masterful Jesús Merino illustrated, is available for purchase in a hardcover edition! If you don't have single issues of WVW and you want a four-issue set signed by me, they're going fast at Bulletproof Comics! Bulletproof is also selling signed copies of my IRON MAN run with Julius Ohta, so if you want those, buy them from Flatbush's finest! 

No one is prouder of WVW than her older sibling, REIGN OF TERROR: HOW THE 9/11 ERA DESTABILIZED AMERICA AND PRODUCED TRUMP, which is available now in hardcover, softcover, audiobook and Kindle edition. And on the way is a new addition to the family: THE TORTURE AND DELIVERANCE OF MAJID KHAN.