Europe joins Obama’s air war in Syria as Arab partners quietly stand down

Friday’s decision by Germany and earlier ones by France and the United Kingdom to join the air campaign against ISIL in Syria mark the most significant sharing of a burden born principally by the United States since the strikes began. But analysts say they serve up a reminder that — rhetoric about a 65-nation coalition notwithstanding — the air war against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant is now largely a U.S.-European affair, with negligible involvement by Arab countries.

When coalition airstrikes began against ISIL in Syria in September 2014, one month after the opening salvo against the group in Iraq, the White House — anxious to avoid the appearance of another unilateral U.S. intervention in the Arab world — heralded the combat role initially played by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Jordan and Qatar. A leading Arab role in the campaign was an “absolute priority of the president’s,” said Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes, adding that “a powerful message” was sent by the involvement of Arab warplanes on the first night of strikes in Syria.

But the differing strategic priorities of the Arab partners saw their involvement in sorties over Syria — they were never in Iraq — rapidly dwindle, to the point that it is unclear if any are still taking place. According to Airwars, an investigative site that tracks coalition airstrikes and casualties, the U.S. has carried out 95 percent of coalition strikes in Syria, with the remaining 5 percent mostly by European air forces. Some months, the U.S. share has been even higher; in August 2015, it crept above 99 percent.

While the Nov. 13 Paris attacks pushed France, Britain and Germany into the ring, “Arab countries have provided nothing in the way of air assets and rather little in training assets,” said Malcolm Chalmers, a British former diplomat who studies U.K. security policy at the Royal United Services Institute in London. “It’s a Western, U.S.-dominated coalition, and it has been from the beginning.”

One reason for limited Arab involvement in the Syria air campaign is a fundamental disagreement over its strategic purpose. Western powers prioritize the fight against ISIL above all else, but the Gulf states and Turkey are concerned that a singular focus on the group ultimately benefits the Syrian regime, whose ouster is a top priority. As peace talks to end Syria’s civil war restart, the Gulf Arab states are concerned that Western powers have retreated from their demand that Assad must go, in order to forge an anti-ISIL agreement with his key backers, Iran and Russia, and out of fear his departure will widen the power vacuum in the country.

The divergence in priorities between Western and Arab capitals has been especially stark since the Paris attacks, which prompted a renewed sense of urgency among Western European governments to tackle ISIL. 

For the Gulf Arab states, however, ISIL’s recent string of attacks — including those in Paris, Beirut, the Sinai Peninsula and Baghdad — has not changed the strategic calculations in Syria. “Now that we have tragedy in Paris, everybody wants to bomb in Syria. But what’s the endgame?” said Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a Dubai-based political scientist. Russia’s intervention has further alarmed Arab governments, because Moscow makes no bones about its priority being to prop up the Syrian regime, using the pretext of a campaign against terrorism to target a wide range of anti-Assad rebels (some of whom are backed by Turkey and the Gulf states).

“America is one way, and Moscow is in the opposite direction,” Abdulla said. “It’s fine to send in airplanes, but that’s no way to defeat [ISIL]. It’s just showing off force without any clear strategy.”

The question of endgame was raised repeatedly in the British Parliament, which voted in favor of strikes on Wednesday after 10 hours of heated debate. Like France, the U.K. was already participating in strikes against ISIL in Iraq, a battlefield less mired in strategic dilemmas because Baghdad invited in the coalition and because the Iraqi national army was ostensibly a suitable ground-war partner. The logic behind strikes in Syria has strengthened in recent months, however, with the emergence of a viable ground partner in the Syrian Kurds, despite Turkey’s objections to U.S. cooperation with forces Ankara deems hostile to its interests.

Analysts caution that the significance of Arab involvement in the Syria air campaign was symbolic rather than tactical, meaning the number of missions they fly is not necessarily an important metric. President Barack Obama said last month, “Given the frequent focus on America’s leadership of this campaign, sometimes the contributions of our partners are overlooked. Nearly two dozen nations — among them Turkey and our Arab partners — contribute in some way to the military campaign, which has taken more than 8,000 strikes against ISIL so far.”

Chalmers pointed out that while the U.K. intervention may make “some difference at the margins,” its more significant contribution may be nonlethal capabilities such as logistical support and intelligence. After all, there is a limited number of targets that can be safely struck each day, given the imperative of minimizing civilian casualties and destruction of civilian infrastructure. In that respect, the other major change in the air war is that the U.S., the U.K. and France have begun to “focus on economic targets, especially oil infrastructure, that had not been targeted to this extent before. They’re now prepared to take a greater risk with civilian casualties than previously.”

The Iraq air campaign remains more of a shared effort. Almost 1 in 3 airstrikes there is carried out by U.S. partners, according to Airwars — a significant contribution, considering those countries’ smaller air forces. The shared burden in Iraq frees up U.S. hardware for operations in Syria too. 

Still, there is no hiding that the much-heralded Arab partners and several other coalition members have faded since the first night of Syrian strikes. Canada’s new Prime Minister Justin Trudeau pulled his country’s planes off the Syria mission in October. Australia hasn’t bombed Syria since September; Turkey, not since August. And while analysts say it is too simplistic to read these withdrawals as a sign of weakened resolve, the changing face of Obama’s “broad coalition” in Syria may speak to the difficulty of ensuring long-term commitment to a fight that could take many years.

Then there are the deeper questions about how strategic goals are advanced by these headline-grabbing shows of force. According to Airwars, there were 26 reported coalition airstrikes in Syria last week, and only two were French. “So even post-Paris, with all the talk about Syria, the reality is that it still remains an almost exclusively U.S. campaign,” said Chris Woods, an investigative journalist who leads Airwars. Moreover, while there was an overall uptick in French strikes, he said, “we didn’t see any in Iraq during that period.” That suggests that France merely shifted resources from Iraq to Syria, perhaps for symbolic effect.

He also noted that Arab allies have other concerns that rank above ISIL among their strategic priorities. One key reason Gulf Arab states have shifted their focus away from the U.S. air campaign in Syria has been to divert their resources to bombing Yemen’s Houthi rebels, whom they see as proxies of their primary rival, Iran.

“They are off fighting another war,” Woods pointed out, “and it’s a sign of the chaos in the Middle East that there is this war in Yemen we don’t even talk about anymore.”