Syria's U.S.-trained opposition fighters wait to learn of their role in a new Syria

from NPR Dec 2024

... Anteri, a colonel and the commander of the Syrian Free Army, a small, U.S.-trained opposition force before the fall of the Syrian regime, spoke with NPR at his base next to a remote U.S. military outpost in southern Syria...

Al-Tanf, originally a U.S. special forces base, has played a key role in training Syrian opposition fighters, including Anteri's. It lies about 200 miles from Syria's capital Damascus, on the main Damascus-Baghdad highway. Abandoned regime tanks lie by the side of the road. Nearby are cast-off Syrian army uniforms, tossed aside by fleeing soldiers as Assad fell.

The Syrian ruler was quickly toppled in a surprise offensive this month by opposition forces, who took back the country with little resistance after more than a decade of civil war. Anteri believes the reason the regime soldiers his forces encountered didn't fight back was because they knew the U.S. military was backing the SFA. Along with a patch bearing the Syrian insignia on his fighters' uniforms, he also instructed soldiers to wear a patch with an American flag.

The American base at al-Tanf is testament to the uneasy U.S. role in a key strategic region. The U.S. has not had diplomatic relations with Syria since 2012, after the start of the Syrian civil war. The bases it established over the past decade in the south and east operate under no Syrian legal authority. They fall under the U.S.-led anti-ISIS coalition operating in Iraq and Syria, but that coalition is soon being dismantled...

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