So what?
The U.S. military allowed thousands of Islamic State militant group (ISIS) fighters to flee from their de facto capital of Raqqa, Syria, in a secret deal that boosted the U.S. fight against the forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, according to a Pentagon-backed Kurdish commander who has since switched his allegiance to Turkey and who spoke to Reuters.
It's a scandal that we will let enemies fight each other?
Syria tried to do this to us, recall, by shipping ISIL fighters east from Lebanon (from the weekend data dump).
American aircraft cratered a road in Syria to prevent a bus convoy of ISIL terrorists from reaching the Iraq border. I'm not sure why we couldn't bomb the buses notwithstanding the civilian drivers. Isn't sending ISIL gunmen to kill our allies and our troops (and that's what depositing ISIL there would do) an act of war that the rules of war allow us to resist despite the human shields driving the vehicles? Three hundred ISIL gunmen in a 17-bus convoy are still in the Syrian desert. Coalition jets also ran a mock attack on the convoy. I bet we would have fired if it was only the drivers we had to consider. But with families in the convoy, it can't really be a target, I suppose.
And this move, if true, is just a partial redress of defeating ISIL in Syria too soon.
Recall to that the Kurds aren't our mercenaries and there was no way they'd bleed too much to crush ISIL only to weaken themselves enough to allow Assad to roll over the Kurds once ISIL was defeated.
The latter is the most important part. I doubt that the escape of ISIL fighters in the east was really our choice to "allow" because the Kurds would not agree to bleed to carry out a strategy of annihilation against ISIL in Syria.
Or are we supposed to think of Assad, Russia, Hezbollah, and Iran as our allies? To Hell with them. Let them finally fight ISIL and kill each other as much as possible.
UPDATE: While there may be a bit of truth to this based on the factors I note, the full accusation that America let 4,000 ISIL fighters escape Raqqa (I never heard that huge number) is in fact yet another Russian disinformation story.
UPDATE: Funny enough there is collusion with ISIL going on in Syria according to a statement by CENTCOM:
“The [ISIS] terrorists freely moved through an area controlled by pro-Syrian regime forces,” the statement said. “This is the second time in less than a month that convoys of [ISIS] terrorists, fleeing the middle Euphrates River valley, transited through regime-controlled territory.”
The U.S. says the Maghawir al-Thawra, a vetted Syrian opposition force, detected the enemy convoy during the predawn hours on Wednesday and “quickly and professionally conducted an operation to prevent their further incursion.” The force received help from the U.S.-led coalition.
So there you go. The multi-war grinds on.
