Mike Giglio writes:

This version of the forever war in Iraq and Syria was built around the work done by local U.S. allies. The fight against ISIS was America’s, but it was also being fought by Syrians, Kurds, and Iraqis—a U.S. strategy known as “by, with, and through.” It meant that local troops carried out ground fighting in battles drawn up by American war planners. It meant that they received arms, training, and logistical support from the U.S. military and were backed by U.S. air strikes. Crucially, it also meant that they were getting help from Special Operations forces, the U.S. military’s most elite units, who work in the shadows around the world to carry out difficult and sensitive missions.

Perhaps the best-known unit is SEAL Team Six, which carried out the Osama bin Laden raid in 2011. But task forces made up of SEALs and other officially classified units such as the Delta Force have carried out the dangerous work of hunting terrorists and breaking up insurgent networks since America’s forever wars began. Often, they work on their own; but sometimes, as in the war against ISIS, they work with local counterterrorism units specially trained for the task. In the “by, with, and through” strategy, these Special Operations forces, along with the better-known U.S. Army Special Forces, or Green Berets, served as a force multiplier—a relatively small number of American troops who made the war effort by local forces far more deadly.

These partnerships have proved invaluable in the war against ISIS. At the same time, they have also opened a small hole in the secrecy that typically shrouds the Special Operations community—by giving the local partners who work with these forces a rare and up-close view of who they are and how they do their jobs.

In Syria, elite U.S. troops among the 1,000 American personnel in the country worked closely with Kurdish counterterrorism units while regular Kurdish fighters carried out most of the ground operations against ISIS. The U.S. partnership with the Kurds grew as America armed and trained them and later merged them with Arab groups under an umbrella militia called the Syrian Democratic Forces. The SDF spearheaded the fight against ISIS in Syria, rolling back its most important strongholds. It has said that it lost more than 10,000 soldiers in that fight.

U.S. military officials wasted no opportunity to laud the SDF’s prowess. So President Donald Trump’s announcement of a hasty and ill-planned withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria to allow for a Turkish onslaught left everyone—allies, lawmakers, defense officials, but most significantly the Kurdish-led forces themselves—stunned. Fearing for its existence in the face of an invasion from NATO-allied Turkey, which considers it an enemy, the SDF has rushed to strike a deal with the Iran- and Russia-backed Bashar al-Assad regime. While the details of this arrangement remain in flux, one possibility is for SDF forces to be folded into the Syrian state, following negotiations to which they suddenly bring very little leverage. As a result, the same Kurdish counterterrorism units that have worked with U.S. Special Operations forces and intelligence may suddenly find themselves working with—or at the mercy of—the Syrian government. This raises a vexing counterintelligence question for America: Might these units be forced to spill their secrets to some of America’s foremost global adversaries, in Assad, Russia, and Iran?

Eric L. Robinson, a former U.S. intelligence official who worked on anti-ISIS strategy at the National Counterterrorism Center, calls the fact that the SDF was forced to seek Assad’s protection in Syria a counterintelligence “nightmare.” [Continue reading…]