James Jeffrey, Washington’s recently appointed Special Envoy for Syria, said America will expand its “transactional” policy toward Syria’s Kurds, which until now were solely viewed as a means of defeating the Islamic State (ISIS).
The three goals of US policy in Syria are de-escalation of the conflict, empowerment of the political process, and an “enduring defeat” of ISIS, Jeffrey said, stressing Iran must be excluded from this process.
“What we are looking for is the enduring defeat of ISIS, a reinvigorated and irreversible political process in Syria led by the Syrian people and facilitated by the UN, and de-escalation of the conflict that will include all Iranian-commanded forces departing from the entirety of Syria,” Jeffrey told a State Department press briefing.
He defined the policy as an open-ended mandate for US troops to stay in Syria beyond the military defeat of ISIS, which he hopes to see in “a few months.”
“We also think that you cannot have an enduring defeat of ISIS until you have fundamental change in the Syrian regime and fundamental change in Iran’s role in Syria, which contributed greatly to the rise of ISIS in the first place in 2013, 2014,” said Jeffrey.
The first US goal is “a fundamental change in the Syrian regime,” Jeffrey explained. Russia and the rest of the United Nations Security Council are on board to establish a committee tasked with rewriting a new and inclusive constitution for Syria, he said.
The establishment of a constitutional committee, however, is far easier than getting all the opposing actors of the conflict to agree on a new constitution following seven years of savage conflict, claiming up to 400,000 lives.
Although the US wants Iranian influence in Syria to end, Jeffrey emphasized the US is not prepared to use military force.
“It’s not a military goal of the United States, it’s not a mission of US military forces,” said Jeffrey.
The US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which has long called for the US to remain in Syria long-term, welcomed Jeffrey’s announcement, which comes days after Washington announced a $12 million bounty on the heads of three top leaders of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), an armed group which shares ties with the SDF and seeks Kurdish autonomy in Turkey.
Sinam Mohammed, the Washington representative for the SDF’s political arm, the Syrian Democratic Council, said that SDF’s governance in northern Syria is the model to be pursued nationwide in order to ensure an “enduring defeat” of ISIS.
“We have created a model in which women have their equal role in society, politics, and diplomacy. If we can do this [throughout Syria], then we can say we have destroyed ISIS’s ideology,” she said.
