Deploying ground troops, Washington’s Plan B for Syria: Analyst

US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said on Friday he is “confident” that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates would send commandos to Syria to help militants fighting against the Daesh (ISIL) terrorist group.
 
Daniel Patrick Welch described the move as a secondary plan for US and its allies after failing to hamper the Syrian government’s significant advances against the foreign-backed militancy in the country.
 
The analyst dismissed as “a complete sham” the claim that US-backed militants in the Arab country, who are fighting the government of Assad, are also participating in the international efforts to defeat Daesh.
 
“What they are really doing is arming this foreign-backed insurgency to take out the legitimate government of Syria,” he explained.
 
Deploying ground troops to the Arab country is an attempt to gain a bargaining chip at the Geneva peace talks, since the US has failed to carry out its regime change policy in Syria, unlike Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries, Welch said.
 
“So this is a plan to bring in commandoes from Saudi Arabia and take territory, it is so obvious. What they want is a bargaining chip.”
 
He said the failure has forced the West to focus on weakening Assad’s administration through fueling division and sectarianism.
 
“They want this little division into ethnic mini-states. If they can’t topple the government, they can try to weaken it by having a greater Kurdistan, a Sunni Arab state, a Shia Muslim state, (and) an Alawite state,” he noted.
 
According to a new report by the Syrian Center for Policy Research, the years-long conflict in Syria has claimed the lives of over 470,000 people since its onset in 2011, injuring 1.9 million others, and displacing nearly half of the country’s pre-war population of about 23 million within or beyond its borders.