by John Kerry
After the agreement was reached in Geneva, we faced the immediate task of ensuring the removal of tons of the world’s most devastating, insidious weapons from stockpiles all over the country, in the middle of a bloody civil war.
First, we had to identify, secure, collect and move the weapons to the port of Latakia, from where they could be shipped out of the country. Then we had to figure out the best place to destroy them. During the first phase—removing the weapons from Syria—we relied on Russia to pressure the Syrians to comply. The Syrians were trying to milk the process for everything they could. They would tell us they needed massive, unnecessary military equipment—the vehicles used to move tanks—to help move the weapons. Nine out of ten of their requests were absurd, and even the Russians told them so.
The second phase—destroying the weapons—was a challenge because we couldn’t find a place to do it. We tried to convince Jordan and Turkey, in hopes of limiting the distance the weapons would have to travel, but neither was willing to take the risk of gas accidentally killing its people. The United States was too far away. Russia told us there was a law on its books that prevented it from bringing foreign chemical weapons into the country. Albania agreed to host the destruction, but shortly after it agreed, the prime minister called me. I could hear protesters chanting in the background as he explained, “Listen to what I’m facing. I wanted to do this. I just can’t. I’m sorry.”
Finally, we came up with a plan to destroy the weapons at sea. One of the ways to destroy Assad’s chemicals was to water them down, creating a big tank of sludge that could then be incinerated. The chemical weapons experts from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) developed a prototype of an incinerator that was small enough to fit on a ship, found a mothballed ship, retrofitted it with the special incinerator, trained a crew and then deployed it. It was creative problem-solving at its best.
By July 2014, the teams had removed roughly thirteen hundred tons of chemical weapons and destroyed them by September. For the first time ever in the middle of a conflict, weapons of mass destruction were removed as an asset in the hands of a warring party. Thirteen hundred tons of chemical weapons were no longer available to Assad or to extremists who, as they swept across the Syrian landscape, would almost certainly have secured some somewhere. In a country that shares a border with Israel, mitigating that massive threat was itself progress. For those reasons alone, the agreement we reached in Geneva was valuable. But it also carried its burden of tragedy.
For one thing, we always believed Assad would find a way to avoid declaring his full stockpile. After all, the OPCW and the world were working off best estimates. While it was a huge accomplishment to remove the thirteen hundred tons, we worried he would hide chemical agents somewhere. Proving so was nearly impossible even though we set out immediately at the UN to try.
But more important, the world had witnessed public, grotesque evidence of what a ruthless murderer Bashar al-Assad had become. Murderers should be punished, not just stripped of their killing arsenal. To the members of the opposition and many of the nations that supported them, Assad was getting away with murder. If the horrifying attack didn’t inspire the world’s intervention, they said, nothing would. They thought Assad and Russia could now see just how war-weary America was; they had little to fear. They weren’t entirely wrong. The impunity with which Assad acted destroyed people’s hope that he could be brought to heel and belied the institutions established to maintain respect for the rule of law. Assad belonged behind bars at The Hague. Everyone knew it, but those most able to do something—ourselves included—were mired in internal gridlock.
I worried that the longer the fighting continued, the more it invited the worst elements of the region into Syria in greater numbers as jihadis. As the number of refugees exploded, I feared the increasingly destructive impact on the social fabric and politics of Europe. I underscored to the opposition that I was not giving up on trying to end the conflict that was shattering Syria. Even lacking the leverage that military force would have given us, we needed to do everything possible to end the war. I promised them I would try to secure additional support to change the reality on the battlefield.
In fact, the battlefield did begin to change—and not for the better. The regime intensified its attacks, taking Homs and other cities. The opposition made headway down the eastern side of the country. The seesaw battles meant thousands were dying every month. Hundreds of thousands were displaced. More than a million people were forced to flee their homes in 2013 alone.
At the other end of the globe, it was like Groundhog Day in Washington, D.C., the same debates replaying every time we convened. “Diplomacy isn’t working because we don’t have enough leverage.” “We need more options. Should we consider direct strikes?” “What would direct strikes look like?” “If we don’t do strikes, what could we do short of that?” “Will that be enough to change Assad’s calculus?” “We need more options.” The debate was endless and circular.
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BASHAR AL-ASSAD WAS “a one-man super-magnet for terror,” I said with emphasis. It was January 23, 2014. Foreign ministers from across the world had convened in Geneva, Switzerland, under UN auspices to focus on the Syrian civil war. Syria’s foreign minister, Walid Muallem, had just delivered a reprehensible speech branding all opposition to Assad as terrorists. It was a sickening insult to average Syrians who had stood up to Assad’s brutality and in return, for close to two years, had been gassed, barrel-bombed, starved and turned into refugees. Now the murderous autocrat was blaming his own people for the scourge of foreign fighters taking advantage of the lawless chaos in Syria, moving back and forth across the Iraqi-Syrian border with ease.
Thousands of miles away in Washington, there was a low-grade skirmish within the National Security Council between those who saw only bad options in Syria and didn’t think we could change the outcome and those of us who wanted to make the most of bad options and thought we should not only try but could make a difference. I argued additional pressure could be brought to bear in ways that didn’t dig us irretrievably into Syria, but did change the dynamics for the better. It was a belief argument, not a provable fact. And I never succeeded in persuading the president the belief was worth acting on, that the risks, such as they were, were worth taking.
Complicating any analysis, the war continued to change. There were now at least two wars being fought with equal brutality: the Syrian civil war between Assad and the homegrown opposition (alongside its proxy fight between Assad’s sponsors in Tehran and Moscow and the Sunni countries), and the increasing incursion of foreign terrorists into both Syria and Iraq.
Fighting Assad in Syria had become a cause célèbre for aspiring jihadis from the region and from Europe, abetted by some of our Sunni friends, who were glad to see angry young men fight the Shia apostate regime. Social media played a shockingly effective role as recruiter in chief for all of it. In Iraq, long-boiling sectarian resentments between Sunni and Shia found a violent synergy with weak, divisive leadership. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki clumsily helped create the environment that allowed for the rise of Daesh by consolidating power among the Shia elite instead of uniting Iraq. His government was in disarray. His military was in shambles.
Even as the overall equation was becoming far more complicated, the Syrian civil war had morphed into a magnet for something else: a threat that, unlike Assad himself, galvanized a remarkable response from the United States. It would go by multiple names: ISIL. ISIS. Daesh. But it was pure evil. Radical, violent extremists launched an assault across Iraq’s Anbar Province and captured the city of Fallujah and parts of Ramadi, the province’s capital. Our experts warned that this group was “al-Qaeda on steroids”—capable, radicalized and well-funded enough to accumulate and hold territory, inching closer to cities like Baghdad and Erbil.
They called themselves the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Countries in the region called them Daesh, an Arabic acronym that t
he terrorists despised. But no matter what you called them, we needed a policy that would ensure they never achieved the full-fledged caliphate they sought so brazenly. We would need to attack them every way necessary before they permanently reordered the Middle East in their ugly and hateful image.
In early June, Mosul, the second-largest city in Iraq, fell, with the Iraqi army crumbling as soon as it was confronted by the extremist fighters. Prime Minister Maliki desperately requested American air strikes. President Obama was in a tough situation. We all were. Iraq was gravely threatened. But because Maliki was hopeless, we knew air strikes alone weren’t a solution. You couldn’t defeat Daesh with Maliki at the helm in Baghdad.
Careful about not repeating history, we were genuinely committed to the proposition that only the Iraqis themselves could decide to change their leadership. Nothing else could produce success. We engaged immediately in delicate, under-the-radar diplomacy to encourage a peaceful transition. Vice President Biden and I made separate trips to Baghdad in June to meet with Maliki. The vice president had developed great expertise on Iraq, both as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and in the White House. His former aide Tony Blinken was instrumental in helping our team to navigate the waters of transition. We were playing a difficult hand—we knew the strategic military imperative was growing to push back on Daesh, but we also knew doing so would relieve the political pressure on Maliki. We didn’t want short-term progress to condemn us to failure in the long term. Timing was critical.
Maliki understood the magnitude of the crisis with one-third of his country under Daesh’s control, but at first he gave no indication that he would depart. American diplomats met quietly with Iraqi leaders to confirm their distrust of Maliki and convey our own. We sent a message: the sustained support they needed was unlikely to come with Maliki in charge. Iraq needed a leader who would govern in an inclusive, nonsectarian manner. The Iraqis landed on Haider al-Abadi. In early August, Iraq’s president formally requested that Abadi replace Maliki and form a new coalition government as prime minister. Maliki was defiant at first but within a few days relented, once he understood that Shia Iran didn’t support his remaining in office any more than the Americans. Daesh was a threat to Iran as well.
While we helped Iraq put its political house in order, empowering it on multiple fronts to repel the terrorists, Daesh gave the world fresh evidence of its barbarity.
James Foley was a young journalist from New Hampshire. I had met his family in 2011 after he was captured and held in Libya, where he was covering the Arab Spring. As chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, I did what I could then to work with the State Department and encourage his release. That story had a happy ending: he was freed. Now, two years later, as secretary, I learned Jim had been kidnapped again—this time covering the war in Syria. My heart sank. He was one of a handful of Americans—journalists, humanitarian aid workers—who had crossed the border into Syria to make a difference and had been taken prisoner by extremists. I met many of their parents. The wear and strain on their faces communicated more than words ever could. I made dozens of phone calls and talked directly to foreign ministers from the Gulf about using their influence, if they had any, to locate and free the captured Americans. One family from Massachusetts was lucky: with Qatar’s intervention, their loved one was released alive.
President Obama went to extraordinary lengths to plan and authorize a rescue mission that put American boots on the ground in Syria where we believed the Americans were being held by Daesh. At the White House, we listened to this mission unfold in real time in the Situation Room. I will never forget the sinking feeling when we all heard the disembodied voice of a courageous special operator on the ground in Syria, inspecting rooms at the location where we were informed the hostages were held: “Dry hole. It’s a dry hole.” The hostages weren’t there.
On August 19, I was in a meeting when a note was passed to me by an aide, his face ashen: a video had appeared on YouTube claiming to show the beheading of James Foley at the hands of a masked, cowardly thug cloaked from head to toe in black. I watched it alongside my chief of staff, who had also come to know the family. My profound feeling of injustice and sadness turned to anger. Something was horribly, unimaginably sick and wrong in the world. I closed my eyes. I wanted this brave young journalist to be home with his family, safe and alive. I wanted Daesh extinguished from the face of the earth. But now I could help accomplish only one of those things.
In real time there was urgent evidence that Daesh’s threat was existential for the region. Not far from the Turkish border, the extremists terrorized a religious minority, the Yazidi families. They murdered the men and enslaved the women. The siege sent the Yazidis fleeing their homes and eventually left tens of thousands stranded on Mount Sinjar, without access to food, water or medicine. It was genocide in the making. Daesh was closing in on Erbil, the Kurdish city where we have a major consulate.
We sat in the Situation Room weighing military options. President Obama was calm and reasoned as usual. Unspoken but palpable in the room was the reality that a president who had been elected in 2008 promising to get the United States out of a war in Iraq had no choice but to order air strikes in that country again—to save the Yazidis and fight off the Daesh incursion. He gave the lonely order. Air strikes rained down to repel Daesh near Sinjar mountain on August 7. The Daesh killers scattered like roaches confronted by the beam of a flashlight.
But the president rightfully wanted to know, before deepening our involvement anymore, that the United States was pursuing a carefully designed, comprehensive strategy above and beyond air strikes. Before deploying our military to fight Daesh in a sustained way, the president outlined three conditions that had to be met: better governance in Iraq, a regional coalition and a comprehensive diplomatic strategy.
We had laid some of the groundwork already, but I went to work immediately, convening the State Department’s top experts to make certain there were no gaps in our approach. Three days later, I delivered a memo to the president. In addition to military support, we would go after Daesh’s financial lifeline, clamping down on any institutions from which money and oil flowed to the terrorists; we would go after Daesh’s ability to recruit foreign fighters, exchanging relevant data and intelligence with nations around the world and expanding the Department of Homeland Security’s ability to prevent recruitment in the United States; and we would go after Daesh’s extremist propaganda, working with partners in the region to counter the hateful rhetoric of the terrorists and amplify the voices of peaceful Muslim leaders. We would devote significant resources to improving the humanitarian situation for those who had suffered at Daesh’s hands. But most important, we would galvanize the broadest possible coalition. Our military commitment would give me leverage to deliver on all these other requisite steps. It wouldn’t be America alone.
The president embraced the strategy in full. The memo became the foundation of our approach from that point forward. I felt unleashed, fully empowered to put together a decisive coalition that could rescue our friends from the clutches of extremist horror. It was energizing to know we were deploying all our assets in one enterprise with the full support of everyone.
Chuck Hagel and I together secured the commitment of our NATO allies. We also moved to line up the Arab states as rapidly as possible. It was obvious to all of us that we needed a united Islamic front to counter whatever degree of Islamic authority Daesh was claiming for its campaign of terror. We couldn’t afford any daylight between us and the Islamic world. I’d been a senator for two wars in Iraq. We were still living the consequences of the second one in an Iraq torn by internal strife. But the first Iraq war was a model to be emulated: Desert Storm, executed by a broad coalition of nations, particularly those in the Middle East. Secretary James Baker personally traveled to dozens of countries to win their engagement. I needed to do the same, relying on personal relationships invested in over years as a senator and now as secretary.
Support from the Gulf was far from automatic. Persuading Sunni leaders to commit their military and their voices to a war against Sunni extremists who were fighting their sworn enemies in Syria and fighting for a return to Sunni dominance in Iraq was not without its own complications. I remember one meeting of foreign ministers in Istanbul where some of my friends from the region talked openly about supporting the toughest fighters to accelerate Assad’s departure and then fighting the “second” war down the road when Assad was gone. But we needed them to all move in the same direction simultaneously. The second war was now.
Many in the region would take their lead from the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The Saudis were still angry that the United States had not gone after Assad, following the chemical weapons attack. Nonetheless, I hoped that building a coalition to fight Daesh might also provide a diplomatic realignment that could ultimately end the larger war in Syria. Assad, after all, had been the one attracting the extremists into Iraq and Syria. But first we had to work together to build a coalition against the extremists.
In Saudi Arabia, because of the extraordinary heat, meetings often happen at night when it cools off a bit. Late one night, I made my way to the summer palace in Jeddah, a magical spot right on the edge of the Red Sea. I was ushered in for an audience with King Abdullah, ninety, and Prince Saud al-Faisal, the longest-serving foreign minister in the world. Saud al-Faisal was a proud Princeton graduate whose wisdom and grace came from an incredible tenure of over forty years as the kingdom’s foreign minister. He had become a good friend. Parkinson’s disease was slowing his voice, but his mind was sharp as ever and his smile just as warm.
