A Small Matter

Nobody's thinking about Syria right now, but there is a little complication in US policy there. 

Congress is nearing a vote on the Pentagon’s request to send $130 million in military assistance to armed groups in Syria fighting the Islamic State, but changing dynamics on the ground could weaken the program’s effectiveness and dampen the Trump administration’s efforts to improve ties with Damascus.

The Counter-ISIS Train and Equip Fund has disbursed hundreds of millions of dollars since 2014 to pay salaries, provide weapons and train vetted partner forces fighting ISIS — primarily in Syria and Iraq.

But in Syria, the organizations that the fund was intended to support, such as the Syrian Democratic Forces, are in the process of integrating with the formal Syrian military, which is overseen by a government the State Department still formally designates as an SST — a State Sponsor of Terrorism.

The SDF are mostly Kurdish peshmerga militia, highly effective fighters with longstanding relations with US Special Forces; 5th Group particularly has ties with the Kurds going back to the era when Saddam was firmly in charge of Iraq. The Syrian leadership were linked to al Qaeda quite directly until not that long ago, but seem to have broken free of that and established a surprisingly decent attempt at ending internal divisions and unifying the long-fractured country. However, they are still on the State Sponsor of Terrorism list. 

It's not an insurmountable problem; a similar thing came up in Libya during the Obama administration, when they wanted to back the anti-Gaddafi rebels who were also al Qaeda affiliates. The State Department had them as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and had to go through the process of rescinding that designation. That proved manageable; but there is an additional workaround that you can probably imagine for yourselves, the one that was being employed in Benghazi. That was of course why we had a consulate in Benghazi staffed by a high-level official with a nearby "Annex." Still, to get the official money soon to be approved by Congress there they have to go through the motions of doing it.