Obama's half-hearted Syria policy — which is now intertwined with his entire Middle East strategy — is being tested again.
Syrian rebels receiving training to fight the Islamic State (aka ISIS, ISIL, or Daesh) as part of the US' "New Syria Force" (NSF) train-and-equip program are required to pledge that they will refrain from attacking pro-government forces loyal to Syrian president Bashar Assad (and his allies).
But the US-backed rebels are to still eager fight and ultimately overthrow the regime.
"The second rule in the training project is that we fight whoever fights us," Abu Iskander, a reported graduate of the training program, told CNN.
"The Assad regime is fighting us. We will control new areas from ISIS, and we will have to face Assad — shall we stay sitting without fighting Assad?"
"We don't want to cry [as victims] on your TV screens," he added. "Instead we want the Assad regime to be stopped."
Assad has already bombed US-backed rebels in Aleppo, and there will come a time when the Obama administration has to either respond with force or back down completely.
This, in turn, brings the policy to a crucial crossroads: Does the administration continue to back NSF fighters when they inevitably clash with Assad? Or does it triple down on its policy of condemning Assad but not engaging him in battle?
Here come the Russians
Complicating the matter is that Russia sent a military advance team to Syria and appears to be setting up housing units for hundreds of soldiers at an airfield in Latakia, Assad's ancestral heartland and a regime stronghold.
The State Department said the move would "risk confrontation with the anti-ISIL Coalition operating in Syria," specifically if Russian airstrikes interfered with the US-coalition air operations or if Russian jets or Russian-backed Syrian forces attack US allies on the ground.
ISIS thrives under Assad's brutality, and Assad is getting a boost from a staunch ally.
“Russia wants Assad to stay alive, and, by putting the focus on ISIS, it gives him another lifeline,” Chris Harmer, a former US Navy officer now at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War, told The Daily Beast.
And so if the US took on Assad, it might be taking on Russia.
'Problematical at best and self-defeating at worst'
But if the US doesn't take on Assad, ISIS will not be defeated.
"Every barrel bomb dropped on defenseless civilians by regime helicopters is a recruiting gift to [ISIS leader] Baghdadi," Fred Hof, a former State Department policy planner on Syria under the current White House, wrote in a recent Foreign Policy op-ed.
The US began training a small group of Syrian rebels in early May on the condition that they focus solely on defeating ISIS, The Wall Street Journal reported.
But 1,000 fighters threatened to quit the training program almost immediately, frustrated with Washington's insistence that they leave Assad alone. To date, roughly 60 Syrian rebels have successfully completed the training.
"If we and our allies wanted to be credible with Syrians, we would start building an all-Syrian national stabilization force capable ultimately of pacifying the entire country and defeating two criminal entities: the Assad regime and ISIL," Hof told Business Insider by email.
"Perhaps ISIL could be the near-term priority if the US and others were to provide rudimentary protection to Syrian civilians," said Hof, who is now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.
"But to leave those civilians to the mercies of the regime and Iran while asking people to sign up to fight only ISIL is problematical at best and self-defeating at worst."
A 'self-inflicted wound'
The Obama administration has remained singularly focused on degrading and ultimately destroying the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq — while also keeping Iran from backing out of the nuclear deal.
While the Obama administration has been allowing Iran to assert itself, however, Assad's savagery has escalated. From January to July 2015, regime forces killed more than 2,500 civilians— three-quarters of all civilian fatalities inside Syria this year.
August saw one of the deadliest regime airstrikes of the war to date: More than 100 civilians were killed when the government bombed a crowded marketplace in the rebel-held Damascus suburb of Douma on August 16.
Since the war began in 2011, regime barrel bombs have killed more than 12,000 people, dwarfing the combined number killedby ISIS and Al Qaeda.
All of that is terrible for US interests — and good for ISIS.
"Baghdadi sees Assad and Iran as his ticket to supremacy in the Sunni Muslim world," Hof wrote in Foreign Policy. "In this light, granting impunity to Assad or Tehran for what the Syrian war has wrought — 300,000 dead, 4 million refugees, 8 million internally displaced, 600,000 besieged, tens of thousands imprisoned, and countless more disabled, terrorized, and traumatized — is more than a moral failure.
It is a self-inflicted wound in the war against the Islamic State."
Significantly, the administration is not blind to this: The president and his advisers "are intellectually accepting of the proposition that the Assad regime's mass murder is a recruiting tool for [ISIS]," Hof noted to Business Insider in June.
"People in the administration are not lacking in intelligence. They can connect the dots on these things."
It's just a matter of if the administration is willing to do anything about it.
SEE ALSO: The US defense secretary just gave a very telling answer to a question about Obama and Assad
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