44 MOTHER JONES |^ JULY / AUGUST 2019
BEHIND THE LINESongoing collaboration between fsa and Nusra fighters, it
still kept the arms flowing. Between 2014 and early 2018,
Syrian rebels would fire at least 1,070 American-made tows,
accounting for nearly two-thirds of all confirmed uses of
anti-tank weapons by rebel forces. In total, Hamoud says
he fired more than 130 tows; 128 hit their targets.in june 2014 , isis made a blitz on the Iraqi city of Mosul
and declared the establishment of a caliphate, a quasi-
state that encompassed 34,000 square miles between Iraq
and Syria. Within two months, the United States began
bombing isis in Iraq. In response, isis released a video
of James Foley, an American journalist who had gone
missing in Syria two years earlier. Foley was kneeling
somewhere in the desert, dressed in an orange jump-
suit similar to those worn by accused enemy combatants
held at the American prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Behind him stood a masked man dressed in black hold-
ing a knife. Foley gave a statement, presumably written
by his captors. By bombing isis, Foley said, the American
government had “signed my death certificate.” The man
in black then beheaded him.
The video showed another kidnapped American jour-
nalist, Steven Sotloff, and the man in black said, “The
life of this American citizen, Obama, depends on your
next decision.” Two weeks later, Sotloff was beheaded.
A week after that, in September, Obama authorized air-
strikes against isis in Syria. It was the US military’s first
intervention in the Syrian civil war. Obama promised he
would not put American boots on the ground, a commit-
ment that would be broken within a little more than a year.
The administration’s legal justification for military in-
tervention in Syria was based on an expansive reading of
the post-9/11 congressional authorization that allowed
President George W. Bush to use military force against
Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and other terrorist groups directly
connected to the attacks. In the following decades, the
Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations have cited the
statute to justify military action not only in Afghanistan
and Pakistan, but in Iraq, Yemen, and Somalia. Including
Syria under this authorization was a stretch: isis was not
part of Al Qaeda. In fact, in the months before Obama ap-
proved military action against isis, it had been at war with
Al Qaeda’s Syrian branch, Nusra.
On September 22, 2014, the United States, with support
from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates,
and Bahrain, began bombing isis in Raqqa and Deir Ezzor.
Some of the cia-backed opposition fighters were outraged.
Opposition groups had spent months asking the United
States to set up a no-fly zone to protect them from the Syrian
military, which had killed far more people than isis had. Now
the Americans seemed to be indirectly helping Assad by at-
tacking one of his enemies. The Hazzm Movement called the
strikes “an attack against our national sovereignty.” The 13th
Division, another fsa brigade, said the strikes were “aimed at
weakening the revolution...and strengthening the regime.”
The new campaign highlighted the contradictions strain-ing the Obama administration’s Syria policy. Unlike the cia
and the State Department, the Pentagon and its allies in the
White House weren’t focused on regime change. They were
continuing the global war on terrorism launched nearly 13
years earlier and stamping out the newest incarnation of
anti-American jihadism. In late 2014, the National Security
Council circulated a classified memo outlining a new Syria
strategy. It said that the United States would deescalate its
war with Assad to prioritize the fight against isis, according
to two officials who viewed the document. There “was a
cold-eyed realization that a weak Syrian government would
contribute to the spread of isis,” one of them tells me.
The expanded American war also fueled the growing
divide within the Syrian opposition. Shortly after US air-
strikes targeted an Al Qaeda–affiliated cell it was linked to,
Nusra turned on American proxies in Idlib, in northwest-
ern Syria. It captured villages and towns from two of the
strongest cia-backed brigades, the Syrian Revolutionaries
Front and the Hazzm Movement. Nusra released images of
what it said was an srf warehouse full of food and other
humanitarian supplies, adding to the rebels’ reputation for
corruption. Jihadist media claimed that Nusra captured
cannons, trucks, tanks, and at least 80 American-supplied
tow missiles. Nusra later posted photos of its fighters set-
ting up the missiles. In early 2015, Nusra launched a new
campaign against the Hazzm Movement, crushing it in
just five days. Some fighters felt they’d been abandoned
by the United States. As one fsa commander complained
to me, “The Americans abandoned us, their allies. They
left us to be killed by Nusra.”
The Pentagon also tried to raise a proxy force to fight isis.
The $500 million Syrian Train and Equip program, started in
late 2014, aimed to churn out some 5,000 fighters per year.
One of those recruits was Mustafa Sejari, a former Islamist
and the political leader of the al-Mu’tasim Brigade, a non-
Islamist faction outside Aleppo. When he first met with the
Americans, he assumed his brigade was being recruited to
fight Assad. “We didn’t understand there was something
called the Pentagon whose work is separate from the cia,”
Sejari tells me. “When we met with an American, we thought
he represented the American point of view in Syria and we
thought the Americans were against Bashar al-Assad.” Sejari
says he was in Turkey for training when he realized his men
would only be allowed to fight isis. “Anyone who wants to
go off and fight other battles ends their relationship with the
Pentagon immediately,” they were told.
The effort quickly fell apart. On multiple occasions,
weapons meant for Pentagon-trained fighters were handed
over to Nusra. “The opposition was more interested in
fighting Assad than it was in fighting isis,” says Robert
Malley, then–senior adviser to the president on the counter-
isis campaign. After five months, the chief of US Central
Command admitted to a Senate panel that just “four or
five” trained fighters remained in the field. The Obama
administration rushed to distance itself from the debacle.
“Many of our critics had proposed this specific option as
essentially the cure-all for all of the policy challenges that