TEL ALO, Syria – More than a week after the Pentagon announced that it had dropped 50 tons of ammunition to Syrian Arabs to support a new offensive against Islamic State extremists, it’s uncertain who exactly it reached.
Leaders of two principal Arab militias said they hadn’t received any arms aid and doubted that any Arab forces had.
“We didn’t get anything,” Sheikh Humaydi Daham al Hadi, the head of the Shammar tribe, told McClatchy in an interview at his palatial compound in Syria’s Hasaka province. “Maybe our partners, the Kurds did,” a reference to the People’s Protection Units, the YPG militia, which, with the help of U.S. air power, now dominates much of northeastern Syria.
Humaydi’s son, Bandar al Humaydi, who heads the al Sanadid militia, said that no Arab militia had received aid “so far as we know.”
“We got nothing, and it’s not clear at all (if we will),” Bandar told McClatchy by phone Tuesday evening.
Another Arab militia commander, Abu Issa, the commander of Liwa Thurwar Al-Raqqa, the Raqqa Revolutionaries, told McClatchy his forces in Raqqa province had not received any U.S. support. He, too, said he knew of no other Arab group that had.
U.S. officials were insistent, however, that the ammunition airdrop had gone where it was intended.
“The airdrop, again, was for the Syrian Arab Coalition,” Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook told reporters Tuesday. “It was successful. It went where it was intended, to the people who were intended to receive it.”
Asked whether any Kurdish militias had received at least some of the 50 tons of ammunition, Cook responded: “It was intended for the Syrian Arab Coalition.”
Whether the ammunition went to Arab fighters or the Kurdish YPG militia is a sensitive issue. Turkey, a U.S. NATO ally, has protested the United States sending arms to the YPG. The YPG is the Syrian affiliate of the Kurdistan Workers Party or PKK, a group that has fought the Turkish government for autonomy for more than 30 years. Turkey, the United States and the EU have designated the group a terrorist organization, and Turkish President President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said last week that Turkey views the Islamic State, the PKK, the YPG “and all other terrorist organizations as equally dangerous for humanity.”
“Those who covertly support terrorist organizations while not providing sufficient support to Turkey in its struggle against terror must know that they are dragging the region and the world into catastrophe,” Erdogan said.
The U.S., however, treats the YPG as independent of the PKK, though the PKK effectively runs the YPG by naming its officers and setting its policies. Arab forces do indeed fight alongside the YPG forces when an offensive is on, but they have entirely different command structures and while they coordinate, they also operate on their own during lulls in the operations.
The Turkish government called in both the Russian and American ambassadors last week to drive the point home and threatened publicly to intervene in Syria if the YPG advances too far and too fast.
“We have expressed this to the U.S. and Russia in the clearest way,” Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu told reporters. “This is an issue of national security for us. Everybody perfectly knows how we take action when it’s about our national security.”
Pentagon statements over the past week have stressed that the U.S. airdrops were directed to vetted Arab militia elements, not to the YPG. But the view from the ground is that this is mainly rhetoric to mollify Turkey.
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