by John Kerry
The king himself was not well at that time. He was courageously carrying out his responsibilities, but you couldn’t predict when exactly he could meet or how strong he would be. I appreciated that he made the effort and that he spent as much time with me as he did. We talked for hours about Syria, Iraq, the region. King Abdullah would never let go of his disappointment over the failure to bomb Syria, but he did take a long view about the friendship between the United States and the kingdom, one that began under Franklin Roosevelt in 1945 and had endured through moments as painful as 9/11. He expressed his concern that the forces of Sunni extremism presented a long-term threat to the very kingdom he would one day pass on to others in the House of Saud, and to Islam itself. In the background we could hear the soft music of prayers played always in the palace. He fingered prayer beads in his hand.
The king had planned to convene a group of regional leaders with me to discuss the coalition. Iraq was not invited; the wounds between the nations were still healing. But I asked the king if Prime Minister Abadi could send his new foreign minister. He agreed. Such an invitation would have been unthinkable just a month earlier.
We were, slowly but surely, building a coalition in reality, not just on paper.
City by city, mile by mile, we began taking back territory in Iraq, our actions welcomed by the new government. But in Syria, Daesh was accumulating more and more territory with near impunity. We had to eliminate the sanctuary the group was creating there.
The president authorized air strikes to wallop Daesh in and around Raqqa, the group’s self-proclaimed capital, and Kobane, a town in northern Syria near the Turkish border. That very first night, our military flew alongside forces from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Jordan and Europe. It was the first time our militaries collaborated to fight Sunni extremists—a milestone in the war against terrorism.
By early 2015, the coalition had swelled to more than sixty member nations from every part of the world. Between launching thousands of air strikes, disrupting Daesh’s command structure, undermining its propaganda, squeezing its financing, damaging its supply networks, dispersing its personnel and forcing the group to change tactics regularly, we had retaken the initiative.
Iraqi forces retook the Mosul and Haditha dams and territory near the city of Tikrit. In Syria, we smashed Daesh’s command facilities, damaged its oil infrastructure and blocked its siege of Kobane. The long-beleaguered opposition actually gained remarkable ground and was pushing into Latakia, the regime’s heartland. Assad was nervous.
But Daesh held on to its foothold in Syria, in large measure because of a powerful recruiting tool: it claimed to be bringing the fight to Assad. We were compartmentalizing—going after Daesh first, with the intention of dealing with Assad second. But on the Sunni street, many wondered why those who claimed to oppose Assad were fighting the jihadis who said they too were fighting him.
It was messy. And in the fall of 2015, it got even messier.
I had hoped the opposition’s progress combined with our military intervention against Daesh might finally force the regime back to the bargaining table. Instead, Assad’s backers—Iran and Hezbollah—seeing that the opposition had made some gains, doubled down. They were well aware that our engagement was limited to stopping Daesh—a fight they shared with us—and to helping the opposition. When their doubling down still didn’t improve Assad’s situation, an even bigger backer played the biggest hand of all: on September 30, 2015, the Russian military launched its first air strikes against the opposition in Syria. The conflict was fundamentally and irretrievably changed.
• • •
THE RUSSIANS TOLD us they were sending their military into Syria in a typical Russian manner—which is to say, they didn’t tell us at all. President Obama and I met with President Putin in New York the day before their strikes launched. We discussed Syria at length. Putin gave us no indication of what was coming.
The next morning, as soon as I learned the news, I caught up to Sergei Lavrov in the hallway of the UN. I said, “Sergei—you guys are now bombing in Syria and moving troops? What’s up?” He looked surprised and at first said, “No way—what do you mean?” I showed him the media reports. He blanched slightly and hurried off, subsequently seen talking on his cell phone. Maybe Sergei was bluffing, but Putin was known to hold his cards close to the vest on issues like Syria and Ukraine, which are especially personal to him.
Either way, the Russians had upped the ante to a degree that they knew we would not match. Sometimes “diplomatic leverage” is just a fancy way of defining who has the greatest stake. For Putin, Syria was a longtime client state dating back to the Cold War, the site of Russian naval bases, his country’s only foothold in the Middle East. No cost was too large for him to pay to protect his investment. I couldn’t persuasively make the same case in the Situation Room.
A week or two later, Teresa and I went home to Boston for a rare long weekend away from Washington. But I was restless. I couldn’t sleep. Syria haunted me. Until that point, our strategy had been to apply pressure on Assad through our assistance to the opposition, in hopes of forcing him to the negotiating table. With Russia’s military now all in, whatever marginal leverage we might have possessed was eviscerated. The regime was reinvigorated. The opposition could expect a bloody winter.
I asked myself a different question: What if we focused foremost on ending the bloodshed and getting humanitarian aid to those who need it? If a genuine cease-fire was in place, perhaps then we could make progress on the political track.
Russia’s engagement on each of these steps would be essential—and unavoidable.
The White House was skeptical. Why would Russia support a cease-fire, let alone spearhead a negotiated political transition? It was a fair question. Maybe we couldn’t get it done, I admitted. But I thought there were reasonable answers. For one thing, both Iran and Russia had accepted principles similar to ours as to how a political transition could take place. I believed they might welcome a legitimate cease-fire to pursue a reasonable political outcome. In Afghanistan in the 1980s, Russia had learned a bitter lesson about quagmires. Putin had been a young KGB colonel in the years when Russia’s best and brightest military officers ran into a meat grinder fighting an unwinnable occupation. The Russians would not want to bleed forever in Syria. They might be amenable to an exit strategy that protected their interests.
But most of all, I asked, what was our alternative? Did anyone see a viable answer we could impose unilaterally, while Russia was flying planes over Syria? I knew I didn’t have the best hand to play, but I’d rather play that hand than just sit back and “admire the problem” while the number of displaced persons grew by the day, while barrel bombs were being dropped indiscriminately on schools, while the fabled city of Aleppo was being destroyed, while the international community seemed powerless before the world to hold atrocity accountable.
In the late fall, Lavrov accepted my proposal to assemble a group of nations that came to be known as the International Syria Support Group (ISSG). No solution would work unless all the major parties were part of the process, including Iran. It took weeks of work, but ultimately, when we convened the first meeting, the foreign ministers from Iran and Saudi Arabia sat at the same table with Turkey, Iraq and Egypt. Given the tensions between all the parties, that in and of itself felt like a milestone, if not momentum. All thirty-one nations eventually came to agreement on a statement regarding the shape of the potential peace.
By December 2015, we had agreed on a series of principles to guide the peace process, later codified unanimously in UN Security Council Resolution 2254, a new road map leading to a transitional Syrian government and democratic, UN-hosted elections within a year. Planning for a cease-fire and increased humanitarian access would begin immediately.
On February 11, 2016, in Munich, ISSG reconvened to talk about a cease-fire—and humanitarian progress. The meeting lasted hours longer than it was supposed to, as usual. The opposition to Assad vehemently
objected to the word “cease-fire.” They thought it implied they were giving up the fight against Assad. “Cessation of hostilities” was easier to swallow. I didn’t care what we called it; I cared about what it might do. Could it stop the violence and allow humanitarian help to be delivered? Could it open up breathing room for leaders to bring the parties to a real negotiation for a political settlement?
At midnight, on February 27, 2016, the cessation of hostilities began. It held for twenty-four hours. Then forty-eight. Then a week. Then two. Then three.
Then it started fraying—slowly at first, and then more rapidly. The regime claimed to be bombing terrorists, when they were mainly hitting the more moderate rebels. Every action has a reaction, so the opposition would understandably attack regime forces. Before too long the violence was as bad as it had been before the cessation of hostilities and, in some places, worse. No one was holding either Assad or the opposition accountable. Worse, the extremists—al-Qaeda, now called al-Nusra, were commingled with our so-called moderate opposition, an uncomfortable fact a number of the opposition’s supporters were unwilling to confront.
For some of my colleagues in Washington, this was enough. There was nothing more we could try to do, they believed. I disagreed. We had the right principles on the table, and we needed to find a new way to make them work. I wasn’t about to stop trying unless President Obama asked me to stop. He never did.
But I never succeeded in persuading him to give me the tool I wanted most: greater leverage. Not boots on the ground or a large-scale operation; even a small strike on an appropriate target would send a message.
Oddly, it was not even easy to engage the Pentagon in a discussion of bolder military options. One meeting sticks out in my memory. We had just finished the umpteenth meeting on options for Syria. A number of small steps had been agreed to. I then asked everyone assembled in the Situation Room a basic question: “Let’s all be honest with each other. Does anyone here think any of these options will actually change anything for Assad or Russia?” Everyone agreed that none of the existing options could truly change the state of play. I turned to the video screen, where then CENTCOM commander General Lloyd Austin was conferencing in from Tampa.
“General, if the commander in chief said to you, ‘I want to end this agony in Syria within the next six to nine months’—if he said that, are there options you could suggest that would achieve that goal?”
General Austin responded, “Mr. Secretary, I don’t think that’s where the president’s head is at.”
“Okay, but I didn’t ask you where the president’s head is at,” I said. “I want to know: Do realistic military options exist that could end this war in six to nine months?”
“Of course there are options. But the president doesn’t want . . .”
Susan Rice jumped in and saved me from my own palpable frustration. I owed her. “The president has always been clear that he wants new ideas. If there are additional options that have not already been submitted, please write them up for the boss.”
I wasn’t the only one calling for more forceful interventions. Samantha Power, ambassador to the UN, and to some extent CIA director John Brennan also believed the risks of inaction outweighed those of using limited military force. But the Pentagon—and, more important, the president—remained as unconvinced as ever that overt military action to support the Syrian opposition, however limited, was worth pursuing.
The Defense Department was just as opposed to the only other alternative: working directly with Russia to de-escalate the conflict. We all knew by now that a cease-fire and humanitarian access could only work if Assad’s air force was grounded. The regime’s air strikes were the primary reason the cease-fire failed, the primary driver of refugees from Syria and the primary source of the military advantage that left the moderate opposition feeling as though they were sitting ducks. President Putin and Lavrov told me they were willing and able to keep Assad’s planes on the ground. In return, they wanted military-to-military cooperation in fighting Daesh and al-Nusra. I thought, If Daesh and al-Nusra are our enemy and we’re supposedly targeting both anyway, why would we not be willing to carefully coordinate with Russia the more rapid destruction of Daesh with a better chance of securing a political settlement? After all, we had agreed publicly on the outlines of a settlement. Given the level of killing, the length of the war and the negative impacts on the region and Europe, and given the threat of Daesh, which every day it existed exacerbated all the other challenges we faced in the region, why would we not want to put the proposition of killing Daesh and al-Qaeda faster to the test? If it worked, together we’d be fighting the actual terrorists, while Russia would have given us veto power over any air strike. If it didn’t work, we’d have eliminated the confusing back-and-forth about who was responsible for what. We would have exposed the Russians. What was the downside?
The new secretary of defense, Ash Carter, dismissed the idea out of hand. He didn’t like the appearance of the United States working with the Russians on any issue. He didn’t trust Russia, and he believed that, from a military perspective, they had more to gain than we did. It was true that we had very publicly suspended all military cooperation with Moscow in 2014, after they’d annexed Crimea. But sanctions in place against Russia over Ukraine would remain intact. I was willing to tolerate Russia claiming some pyrrhic public relations victory from military cooperation if it meant Assad’s air force wasn’t killing Syrians and if we could destroy the terrorists faster.
I couldn’t and still don’t understand Ash’s rigidity. He wouldn’t budge. He had no proposal of his own to end the Syrian civil war, but he was openly scornful of the one idea on the table.
After much debate, the president gave us the go-ahead to organize a detailed proposal.
By design, the plan was simple. The cease-fire would start immediately, and Assad’s forces would stop flying. Humanitarian convoys would enter besieged areas. If this proceeded smoothly for forty-eight hours, the U.S. military would begin coordinating with the Russians through what we named the Joint Implementation Cell. Once that was up and running successfully, negotiations for an end to the war would begin.
It made sense to me. Ash disagreed. He argued that we needed not two, but seven days of calm before we could start working with the Russians to kill terrorists.
I was baffled. Seven days of calm was impossible. There were too many spoilers—from Assad to Daesh and al-Nusra—all of whom would want this effort to fail. Why? Because part of the deal was that Russia would keep Assad’s air force from flying, which Assad didn’t want, and the other part was that we and Russia would jointly target al-Nusra and Daesh, which they didn’t want. Giving the worst actors seven days to disrupt the calm was a poison pill. But Ash dug in. The president signed off on my overall plan but accepted Ash’s condition: seven days. The plan was doomed before we walked out of the Situation Room.
The Russians met us in Geneva to review and finalize the proposal. We reached an agreement around noon on Friday, September 9, but because Washington was six hours behind, they still needed to review the final text. Nine hours after we sent the text back to Washington, Washington wanted one line added. Lavrov said it was redundant. I explained that Washington was adamant. Sergei predictably flipped out. “Are you fucking kidding me? That’s already in the fucking agreement! We already have that covered!”
I repeated that we needed the extra line. Eventually, Lavrov relented. “Fine. We can make that addition, on one condition: we also have to add, right after that new sentence, ‘as it already says below, in the same fucking paragraph.’ ” We left out the swear word, but otherwise agreed. The final text of the September 9 agreement includes both Washington’s and Lavrov’s additions.
The agreed-upon seven days of “calm” began quietly in mid-September, right before the world headed to New York for the UN General Assembly, my last one as secretary of state. On September 17, an alarming wire story popped up as a news alert on my phone: an American
air strike had accidentally killed seventy uniformed Syrian regime troops.
I reached Lavrov as soon as I could. He was furious. The Russians accused us of targeting the Syrians on purpose. In a perverse nod to our war-fighting abilities, they did not believe the U.S. military could make such a mistake. They outright accused the military of not wanting to work with them and therefore purposely killing the possibility. Publicly and privately I vehemently defended our action as the purest of accidents, but nothing I said could convince him of the truth that it was a horrible accident.
Two days later, a humanitarian convoy was bombed as it tried to make its way to deliver aid to civilians in Aleppo. The Syrians and Russians were the only ones with any flights in the vicinity, and eyewitness reports as well as technical tracking of aircraft pointed to Assad’s air force. The opposition had no aircraft. Everything I predicted had played out. We had spent months negotiating the path of that convoy. Bombing the aid workers was not only despicable, it was the final shredding of the diplomatic process into which so many had put so much. We never got to test whether cooperating on anti-extremist efforts and enforcing the cease-fire against Assad together with a veto on Russian and Syrian flights would have brought everyone to the table.
Two days later, Lavrov and I sat several seats away from each other at a UN Security Council session. He spoke before me, and as I listened, I could hardly contain my incredulity. The rapid disintegration of the agreement that began with our unfortunate accident and followed by the humanitarian convoy bombing had clearly put the Russians squarely back to status quo tactics. It was an appropriate moment of the surreal for all that had transpired. Despite the attack on the convoy, Lavrov called for the inter-Syrian political talks to resume quickly, “without any preconditions.” He called for a “thorough and impartial” investigation into the bombing. He denied that either the Russians or the Syrians had attacked the convoy when evidence and common sense proved otherwise. He asked that his counterparts “refrain from emotional responses.”
