The administration wants to put some 5,000 Free Syrian Army personnel through training. | Getty
How dirty is President Barack Obama prepared to get in the war to defeat ISIL?
Beating back the brutal Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant may require cozying up to unsavory groups in Syria — including some currently affiliated with the Al-Qaeda-linked Nusra Front — and may collide with existing law if the groups the U.
S. wants to train or co-opt have murky human rights records, former officials and analysts say.Obama administration officials said Tuesday that they would work closely with intelligence sources and regional partners to keep U.S. weapons out of the hands of jihadist groups, but they maintained that ISIL poses such a dire threat that it must be countered despite the dangers.
“We will monitor them closely to ensure that weapons do not fall into the hands of radical elements of the opposition, ISIL, the Syrian regime or other extremist groups,” Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing Tuesday. “There will always be a risk in a program like this. But we believe that risk is justified by the imperative of destroying ISIL and the necessity of having capable partners on the ground in Syria.”
Obama has spoken of the moderate opposition that the U.S. wants to aid in fighting ISIL as middle-class professionals who require significant training to become a viable fighting force. The administration wants to put some 5,000 of these Free Syrian Army personnel through a training program in Saudi Arabia at a cost of about $500 million.
Analysts say it’s not clear whether the administration can quickly find that many potential fighters who meet current vetting standards. In public statements, officials have been vague about what those standards are. The White House referred POLITICO’s questions about the vetting standards and any potential changes to the process to the Pentagon and State Department, neither of which responded to queries on the issue.
“When do we run out of doctors, lawyers and dentists? When do we run out of these Minutemen?” asked former National Security Council staffer Douglas Ollivant. “Then we start getting into really nasty groups.”
Speaking at the Center for American Progress on Friday, Ollivant, now with the New America Foundation, raised the prospect of “former Al-Nusra and Islamic Front fighters coming over, joining us, being trained by us, either in a covert manner or perhaps, eventually, overtly.”
“There are moderates. The problem is they coordinate with jihadists against the Assad regime,” Andrew Tabler of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy said at the same think-tank discussion. “Syrian moderates are extremely difficult to deal with … because of their inability, or unwillingness because of the situation they’re in, to make clear distinctions” between groups the U.S. considers terrorists and others opposed to the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad.
U.S. alliances that include jihadist groups could also conflict with legal provisions, named for Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), limiting the provision of equipment or training to fighting forces involved in human rights violations.
In an interview Monday, Leahy warned against any attempt to tinker with the human rights standard put in place by the legislative provisions that bear his name.
“Some people are grumbling about that all the time,” the senator said. “The few times it has been waived, it’s come back to haunt us. As Americans, we understand that we have to stand for something.”
At the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, some senators expressed concerns about the backgrounds of the fighters the Pentagon is planning to train. However, the focus was less on human rights and primarily on the risk that they might turn against the U.S. at some point.
“The only thing I know that we’re sure of is that training and those weapons will probably be used against us down the road,” a skeptical Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) declared.
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) said she worried about Syrian rebels she met with who were so committed to their cause that they wouldn’t rule out using chemical weapons if they got their hands on them.
“How can you truly vet them? And how can we have any hope that if they do agree to fight ISIL on some level, not just Assad, that they will continue to do so and not align themselves with ISIL when they feel like Assad is in their sights?” she asked.
Language in proposed legislation authorizing the Obama administration to train and equip personnel to fight against ISIL in Syria, which the House could vote on as soon as Wednesday, includes a vague requirement about vetting potential trainees for “associations with … terrorist groups, Shia militias aligned with or supporting the government of Syria, and groups associated with the Government of Iran.” The legislation goes on to say the vetting should focus on ties to ISIL, the Nusra Front, Ahrar al-Sham, other Al Qaeda-related groups and Hezbollah.