Kurds catch 9/11-linked jihadist
QAMISHLI, Syria, April 19, (Agencies): A Syrian-born German national accused of helping to plan the September 11, 2001 attacks has been detained by Kurdish forces in Syria, a senior Kurdish commander told AFP Wednesday.
“Mohammed Haydar Zammar has been arrested by Kurdish security forces in northern Syria and is now being interrogated,” the top official said, without providing further details.
Zammar, who is in his mid-fifties, has been accused of recruiting some of the September 11 hijackers.
He was detained in Morocco in December 2001 in an operation involving CIA agents, and was handed over to the Syrian authorities two weeks later.
A Syrian court sentenced Zammar to 12 years in prison in 2007 for belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood, a charge that at the time could have resulted in the death penalty.
But conflict broke out in Syria four years later, and many hardline Islamist prisoners were released from jail or broke free and went on to join jihadist groups fighting in the war.
Al-Qaeda operated a branch in Syria known as Al-Nusra Front, but the affiliate has since claimed to have broken off ties.
The Islamic State jihadist group also rose to power in the country’s north and east, but a US-backed alliance has ousted it from swathes of its onetime “caliphate.”
The Syrian Democratic Forces, a coalition of Arab and Kurdish fighters, has caught several foreign members of IS in Syria in recent months, particularly since the SDF captured the northern city of Raqqa from the jihadists.
The Kurdish commander who spoke to AFP on Wednesday declined to say whether Zammar had been actively fighting as a member of an extremist group in Syria.
The Pentagon said it had nothing to confirm on Zammar’s capture but was looking into it.
US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis on Wednesday disputed a report saying he had unsuccessfully urged President Donald Trump to seek congressional approval ahead of last week’s air strikes in Syria.
Citing anonymous military and administration officials, The New York Times said Mattis had recommended
Trump get approval from lawmakers before launching Friday’s cruise missile barrage against three targets the Pentagon said were tied to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s chemical weapons program.
“I have no idea where that story came from,” Mattis told reporters as he greeted Qatar’s defense minister, Khalid bin Mohammed al-Attiyah, at the Pentagon.
“I found nothing in it that I could recall from my own last week’s activities.”
Chemical weapons inspectors are waiting to go into Douma, near Damascus, to probe allegations of a chemical gas attack on April 7 that prompted last week’s US-led response.
Mattis said the regime has previously used delays after such an attack to “try to clean up the evidence before the investigation team gets in. So it’s unfortunate they were delayed.”
Following the deadly Douma incident, Trump tweeted there would be a “big price to pay” after and promised missiles would be coming.
His remarks virtually ensured a response to the alleged chemical attack, even though many US lawmakers have expressed reservations over further military engagement in Syria unless Trump can articulate a long-term strategy for the country.
A Pentagon official told AFP that there was no debate at the White House, and that “everyone” agreed Trump had the authority needed to launch the strikes.
Later Wednesday, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders denied the Times story and said Trump “appropriately ordered the strikes under his constitutional authorities.”
In the days since the US-led strikes, which also saw British and French jets launch missiles, debate in Washington has continued about whether Trump has the legal authority to conduct strikes against the Syrian regime.
On Monday, a bipartisan group of senators introduced a bill that would update war powers that first were passed in the days after the Sept 11, 2001 attacks.
US forces have largely been operating under this so-called AUMF (Authorization for Use of Military Force) even though the Pentagon’s mission has grown far beyond what was envisioned in the early days of hunting alQaeda in Afghanistan.
Since 2001, presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and now Trump have relied on the authorities, along with a subsequent AUMF in 2002, as the basis for operations against armed Islamist groups.
One of the bill’s authors, Republican Senator Todd Young, said it “recognizes the unique nature of the Islamist terrorist threat, while also recognizing that Congress must exercise robust oversight.”
Former president Barack Obama faced sharp criticism when he tried and failed to have Congress approve a plan to attack Assad after the Syrian leader crossed Obama’s “red line” and used chemical weapons in 2013.
Meanwhile, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Russia held a meeting in Baghdad on Thursday of military and security officials to coordinate “anti-terrorism” efforts, the Iranian defence ministry said.
“Cooperation in intelligence between the four countries for common aims and anti-terrorism missions has been successful in restoring stability and security, and it should form the basis for future cooperation,” Defence Minister General Amir Hatami said in a statement from the Iraqi capital.
The “coalition” had played an “important role in the defeat” of the Islamic State group in both Iraq and Syria, he said.
The meeting came the same day as Iraq said its air force carried out a raid on IS positions in Syria.
Tehran supports the Iraqi government and the Russian-backed regime in Syria in fighting rebel groups and jihadists by sending “military advisers” and “volunteers” from Iran and Afghanistan.
The drama of US and allied missile
strikes on Syria has obscured a sobering fact: The US-led campaign to eliminate the Islamic State from Syria has stalled.
The US has 2,000 troops in Syria assisting local Arab and Kurdish fighters against IS, even as President Donald Trump resists deeper US involvement and is eager to withdraw completely in coming months. Trump wants “other people” to deal with Syria, whose civil war has spawned the greatest humanitarian crisis since World War II in terms of refugees.
It’s unclear whether Trump will go ahead with a total US withdrawal while IS retains even a small presence in Syria.
Since January, when Trump asserted in his State of the Union address that “very close to 100 percent” of IS territory in Syria and Iraq had been liberated, progress toward extinguishing the extremists’ caliphate, or self-proclaimed state, has ground to a halt and shows no sign of restarting. US warplanes continue to periodically bomb remaining pockets of IS in eastern Syria, but ground operations by US partner forces have slowed.
“We’ve halted forward progress and are essentially attempting to avoid losing territory we’ve gained to date,” said Jennifer Cafarella, an analyst at the Institute for the Study of War. She sees two potential solutions: send additional US combat power to eastern Syria to take on IS more directly, or resolve a diplomatic dispute with Turkey that has largely sidelined the main US military partner in Syria, the Syrian Democratic Forces.
Now that Trump has upped the ante by attacking Syria directly for the second time in just over a year, Cafarella said in an interview this week, it is possible that Syria and its two main international supporters — Russia and Iran — will retaliate militarily against American forces and their Kurdish and Arab partners in eastern Syria “in an attempt to compel an American withdrawal by raising the cost of continued American involvement.”
The US began bombing IS in Syria in September 2014 and deployed an initial contingent of 50 special operations troops in the country the following year. The anti-IS campaign gained momentum in 2016 and made its biggest gains during Trump’s first year in office.
A spokesman for the US-led military coalition against IS refused this week to say how many IS fighters remain. Col. Ryan Dillon said they are holed up mainly in two places in eastern Syria. He said they are in and around the town of Hajin on the Euphrates River north of Bukamal and in Dashisha near the city of Deir el-Zour. They are “contained” in these areas, he asserted, suggesting they are not in immediate
danger of being ousted.
Of concern, Dillon said, are indications that IS is stepping up successful attacks against pro-government fighters elsewhere in Syria.
The Trump administration has been saying in recent months that 98 percent of IS territory has been liberated, suggesting the campaign was close to final victory, although on April 3 the Army general overseeing the campaign, Joseph Votel, put it differently, saying “well over 90 percent” of the caliphate had been retaken.
“The situation continues to become more and more complex,” Votel said, alluding in part to the effects of a Turkish incursion into the town of Afrin in northwestern Syria.
The Afrin operation was part of a Turkish plan to drive the main Syrian Kurdish militia, known as the YPG, away from the Turkish border area. Turkey considers the YPG a threat to its national security and an extension of Kurdish insurgents inside Turkey. But the YPG also is America’s main partner in Syria; it forms the backbone of the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF. Turkey’s advance on Afrin prompted the SDF to shift from fighting IS to confronting Turkey in Afrin.
The result: “We are no longer in an offensive effort on the ground against them (Islamic State),” Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told reporters March 27.
Even so, eliminating IS in Syria remains the goal, he said after Trump announced the missile strikes to punish the Syrian government for its alleged chemical weapons use.
The barrage of 105 missiles launched by the United States, Britain and France last week to destroy elements of Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal was designed to deter President Bashar Assad from repeating his alleged use of chlorine gas and perhaps nerve gas on civilians in a Damascus suburb. It was unrelated to the IS problem, except in the sense that it highlighted the jumble of actors involved and the absence of a broad US strategy.