Accidental Allies: The US–Syrian Democratic Forces Partnership Against the Islamic State by Michael Knights & Wladimir van Wilgenburg

Author:Michael Knights & Wladimir van Wilgenburg [Knights, Michael & Wilgenburg, Wladimir van]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, General, Middle Eastern, Political Science, World, Political Freedom, Geopolitics, Security (National & International)
ISBN: 9780755643028
Google: aO5NEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2021-10-21T06:11:39+00:00

SDF = Syrian Democratic Forces; YPG = People’s Defense Units; HPX = Self-Defense Forces. Source: Lead Inspector General Report for Operation Inherent Resolve to the United States Congress in Q4 2016, Q1 2017, Q2 2017, and Q3 2017.

Training for the Raqqa Campaign

In late 2016, the outgoing Obama administration dropped its arbitrary one hundred–person force manning limits for the Syrian operation (up from fifty earlier), bringing the number of U.S. boots on the ground to around three hundred by early 2017.58 These reinforcements, largely Operational Detachment Alphas from the U.S. Army 5th Special Forces Group, were optimized for training indigenous forces in the Middle East. Some ODAs had been providing fifteen to twenty days of tablet, fire support, medical, counter-IED (improvised explosive device), and mortar training to SAC units in northeast Syria since early 2016, and to the new Raqqa Internal Security Force (RISF) units more recently.59 By early 2017, about a dozen U.S. teams ran a total of three to six training courses at any time.60 U.S. forces also provided some officer training for foj (regiment) level groups, roughly akin to a small U.S. battalion.61

Before undergoing this U.S. training, the SDF took three precautionary steps. First, the group secured the trainees’ biometric data and identification documents for vetting by the United States. Second, the YPG itself put the recruits through thirty days of basic soldier training, aided by SAC trainers who themselves had been prepared by the United States as future mentors in “train the trainer” courses in 2016.62 During the final portion of the U.S. training, the SAC recruits were issued with U.S. equipment and given the first paycheck of their U.S.-provided salaries. (By May 2017, the stipends of all SAC forces of the Manbij Military Council, the Deir al-Zour Military Council, the RISF, and various SDF engineering units were paid by the United States.63)

Third, added efforts were made in the lead-up to Raqqa to weed out underage recruits (i.e., child soldiers)—“for the world outside,” as one Arab SDF officer recalled.64 The YPG had a historic practice of recruiting and even allegedly conscripting underage fighters.65 The United Nations, which annually reports documented child recruitment by the YPG/SDF, noted in 2019 that the YPG had recruited 283 children (of 820 total children recruited by armed groups and Syrian government forces).66 Journalist Roy Gutman reported from interviews on the suppression of local media coverage of the issue and protests against child enlistment. The YPG had signed a commitment to ban the practice in June 2014, but Human Rights Watch reported a year later that the ban had been loosely enforced.67 According to a 2016 UN report, the YPG “continued to recruit boys and girls as young as 14 years of age for combat roles, with pressure and coercion by communities reportedly a factor.”68 Although some improvements are apparent,69 and the SDF and Autonomous Administration have taken more measures to combat the practice,70 some use of underage fighters probably continues at the time of writing.71

In 2016, the United States also undertook its first large-scale training of the YPG.

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