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U.S.-Led Coalition Forces Begin Air Campaign Against ISIS In Syria

President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi of Iraq hold a bilateral meeting at the United Nations in New York, N.Y., Sept. 24, 2014.
Pete Souza
/
The White House
President Obama and Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi of Iraq hold a bilateral meeting at the United Nations in New York, N.Y., Sept. 24, 2014.

On Tuesday the United States and its allies began what will likely be a sustained air campaign in Syria to break the power of the Islamic State.

Joshua Landis, the author of the blog Syria Comment and Director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, says that while this strategy may be successful against ISIS in Iraq, Syria is a different story.

“We're bombing, but ISIS controls over a third of the country. What do you do after you bomb? We haven't figured that out yet,” Landis says.

President Obama has pledged to arm and train moderate Syrian rebel groups to be coalition partners on the ground. But Landis says with over 1,000 militia groups fighting in the country, it might be more than a year before there will be a thoroughly vetted and equipped Syrian force ready to take over control of ISIS-held territory.

“The rebels have been notoriously undependable,” Landis says. “And we refuse to work with the Assad government, so we don't have anybody to take the ground. And that's going to leave us in a very difficult position because we're just going to be killing people. And we're not going to be establishing something better for them.”

Despite the unpredictability of Syrian rebel troops, the power vacuum can’t be filled by foreign forces, Landis says.

“You can't have American troops take over whole towns and begin to occupy this as a territory because then we'll be sitting ducks for car bombs and all those things that went wrong in Iraq,” Landis says. “And that's what Obama is promising will not happen.”

There’s also growing Syrian dissatisfaction with the way American intervention is playing out.

“Yes, ISIS has taken them over, but all the buildings are being destroyed,” Landis says. “The oil refineries were hit yesterday. So their source of income, their infrastructure, is going to be destroyed by America. They want to know who's going to bring security. How am I going to send my kids back to school? What's happening tomorrow? Are you just going to bomb me forever?”

So far, the United States is staying out of nation-building operations in Syria. The strikes against Al-Qaeda’s Khorasan group in Syria, though, show that ISIS is not the only threat or target in the region, Landis says.

“This group was sent by the head of Al-Qaeda to the Al-Qaeda groups in Syria to help them theoretically take out leadership of other rebel groups, but also, from what America says, they're devising ways to hit the American homeland,” Landis says.

This gives added legitimacy to American operations in Syria.

“This is related to 9/11, this is al-Qaida as well as ISIS, and it also is indicating to Americans and the world that this is a self-defense operation,” Landis says. “We are hitting people that are trying to hit us.”

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