Congress Muddles Washington’s Syria Strategy

C ongress has taken several steps within the newly passed annual defense bill that are likely to exacerbate the Biden administration’s confused Syria policy.

For one, lawmakers voted to require the administration to craft a strategy for turning America-led counter-ISIS operations back to allies on the ground in northeast portions of the country, a withdrawal that more hawkish members say is premature. Although the terrorist caliphate was devastated in recent years by a U.S.-led military campaign, a U.N. report this year found that the group continues to operate in Iraq and Syria, even in its current diminished state. Meanwhile, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad has started to reconsolidate his control over the country after a decade-long civil war in which his forces brutally put down an uprising.

The provision will require the secretary of state to submit a congressional report detailing a timeline according to which U.S. forces will pass “security responsibilities” back to Kurdish forces fighting ISIS. Some hawks are furious that the amendment made it into a compromise draft of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) amid a highly chaotic process this year, panning it as a concession to Assad, who has operated an industrial system of mass slaughter and, more recently, turned his government into one of the world’s most prolific exporters of an illicit amphetamine. U.S. officials are required by law to enact an economic-sanctions pressure campaign against the Syrian government, but observers note that sanctions designations have flagged under Biden. In fact, the Wednesday evening before Thanksgiving, the Treasury Department broadened sanctions exemptions that will let companies do business with the Syrian government as long as they claim that they’re involved in reconstruction activities.

Both houses of Congress have now passed the NDAA, with the amendment, and President Biden is expected to sign it into law.

The withdrawal strategy set to be mandated by the NDAA, one senior GOP aide told National Review, “is an embarrassment and an attempt by Democrats to green-light a withdrawal from Syria and a weak stance toward Assad. It also illustrates that the Democrat approach to Syria is defined purely out of politics: Remember when President Trump withdrew U.S. troops from Syria and in a panic Democrats quickly passed a resolution condemning it? What changed?”

Other parts of the amendment, by contrast, demand a tougher approach to implementing mandatory sanctions to punish human-rights abusers than has been unfurled by the Biden administration up to now, and the amendment also requires the administration to come up with ways to prevent normalization with Assad and to seek to do more to go after his human-rights abuses. These last bits line up with a different NDAA provision, successfully pushed by Representative Claudia Tenney and the Republican Study Committee (RSC), the largest caucus of conservatives in the House, that would make it easier to home in on Assad’s inner circle with sanctions.

All of this mirrors the cacophonous way in which the administration has oriented its approach to Syria. Recently, it unveiled the conclusions of a review of its strategy toward the country, but significant questions remain, and some experts accuse Biden officials of unwisely placing the Syria portfolio on the back burner amid other competing foreign-policy priorities.

Joel Rayburn, the U.S. special envoy to Syria under the Trump administration, said that although the State Department appears to have made a clear rebuke of U.S. allies’ moves toward normalization with Assad, the lackadaisical way in which the policy has been rolled out sent “mixed signals. Although the administration is “starting to be vocal about” opposing U.S. regional partners’ move toward normalization with Assad, Rayburn told NR that “they were really quiet about it while their Syria policy review was going on. I think they lost some ground in that regard.”

Congress also seems to have missed an opportunity to force the Biden administration to develop a strategy dealing with Syria’s transformation into the Middle East’s foremost narco-state. The issue has received much attention recently, with the New York Times and the Washington Post reporting on the vast drug-smuggling networks run by the Syrian military and Assad associates. Not only does widespread captagon smuggling across the Middle East put money in Assad’s and Hezbollah’s coffers, but it could also serve to destabilize U.S.-aligned countries such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

One quietly nixed NDAA amendment would have tasked the Biden administration with coming up with an interagency strategy toward dealing with the Syrian military’s rapid production and export of the highly addictive drug. Although the captagon amendment was approved by senior Republican and Democratic lawmakers across the board, it mysteriously didn’t appear in the NDAA.

Representative Joe Wilson, who leads the RSC’s national-security task force, expressed the conservative caucus’s “deep concern” about the captagon amendment’s removal. “As recent reports have shown, the brutal Assad regime is involved in industrial scale Captagon production and the drug trade is one of the essential means that it uses to fund its war machine, while causing people all across the region and even in Europe to become addicted to illicit drugs.”

The NDAA did include a watered-down version of the amendment expressing support for an end to captagon trafficking. And eventually, this measure might pass as a separate, standalone bill, such as one that Representatives French Hill and Brendan Boyle introduced on Wednesday. But the failure to get the administration to prioritize this is part of a broader pattern.

“Every administration that comes into office says, ‘You know what, we don’t want to have to worry about Syria, and we don’t want to have to worry about the broader Middle East,’” Rayburn told NR. “Within months they find themselves having to deal with some crisis.” The administration doesn’t really know what it’s doing in Syria, and with the NDAA, Congress is only set to intensify Washington’s confusion.