ISIS repels advance by U.S.-backed Syrians
Troops are forced to withdraw after failure of offensive
IRBIL, Iraq — The U.S. military’s efforts to confront the Islamic State in Syria suffered another setback Wednesday after the militants routed the only group to have survived intact an ill-fated Pentagon program to train and equip moderate rebels last year.
The U.S.-backed New Syrian Army said it was forced to withdraw its forces to its base at Tanf near the Jordanian border after launching what appears to have been a poorly conceived offensive aimed at capturing the strategically important eastern Syrian town of Abu Kamal on the Syrian-Iraqi border.
Islamic State claims, published by its Amaq news agency that its fighters had killed 40 members of the group and captured 15, could not be independently confirmed and appeared to be exaggerated. IS social media accounts posted photographs and videos showing brutalized bodies, the beheading of one fighter and small quantities of U.S.-supplied weaponry.
The New Syrian Army said in a statement only that it lost “several men” before the group “successfully departed” to Tanf, more than 150 miles away in remote desert terrain near the Jordanian and Iraqi borders.
But other Syrians affiliated with the group said its attack did not go according to plan and that sleeper cells in the town that were expected to join the offensive failed to materialize.
The battle was a setback, they said, for a small group that was depleted further by an Islamic State suicide bomber in May and by a Russian airstrike in June. The group was formed last year with only about 100 men, and its ranks had dwindled by the time the offensive was launched, according to commanders.
The rout also raised further questions about the United States’ strategy in Syria at a time when the Islamic State’s defenses are crumbling on multiple fronts elsewhere. On Monday, Iraqi security forces finished driving the militants from the symbolically important town of Fallujah, 45 miles west of Baghdad, and, in recent weeks, the Islamic State has been forced to retreat in several key locations of northeastern Syria by the predominantly Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces.
The eastern Syrian province of Deir al-Zour, where Abu Kamal is located, is now the only major territory controlled by the Islamic State in which the militants face no major challenge. The offensive could have changed that, while also severing one of the group’s last remaining supply routes between Syria and Iraq.