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THE UNITED STATES is committed to defeating the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, but as that goal nears realization, another strategic question looms: What security order will replace it, and which of the outside powers enmeshed in the region will stand behind that order? The Trump administration doesnt appear to have a strategy for that, but others clearly do which helps to explain the incidents over the weekend in which the United States downed a Syrian government warplane , while Iran fired intermediate-range missiles from its territory at Islamic State targets in eastern Syria.

Though the two incidents were nominally unrelated, they have a common cause: the drive by Iran and Russia, along with their Syrian and Iraqi Shiite clients, to dominate the space that will be left when the Islamic State is driven from its capital of Raqqa in eastern Syria, which is under assault from U.S.-backed Kurdish and Syrian Arab forces. At stake are both Syrias oil-producing area to the south of Raqqa and a land corridor between Baghdad and Damascus that Iran aspires to control. Russia, for its part, hopes to drive the United States out of the region.

In the past month, U.S.-backed forces in Syrias southeastern corner have come under pressure from Iranian-backed Shiite militias. U.S. commanders have twice bombed convoys that entered an exclusion zone around a border town where American advisers are based and they have destroyed a drone . The Syrian fighter bomber shot down Sunday violated another exclusion zone around the forces surrounding Raqqa. Meanwhile, Irans missile attack, which it said was in response to the Islamic States recent raid on the parliament building in Tehran, was a bold assertion of its willingness to escalate militarily in Syria and maybe elsewhere in the region.

Syria and Iran may calculate that the Trump administration can be induced to abandon the area rather than risk being dragged into a war in the Syrian desert unrelated to the Islamic State. Russias loud protests about the downing of the fighter and its threats to challenge U.S. planes over Syria show that Moscow is more than ready to support this gambit.

The United States doesnt have a strategic reason to control southern and eastern Syria, but it does have a vital interest in preventing Iran from establishing a dominion from Tehran to the Mediterranean with Russias support. That would pose an existential threat to Israel, which is already struggling to prevent Iranian infiltration of Syrian territory adjacent to the Golan Heights, and would undermine U.S. allies in Jordan and Iraq.

Countering Iran and Russia requires tactical defense by U.S.-backed forces, like that recently ordered by commanders on the ground. But it will also require a broader strategy to create a security order in the region acceptable to the United States and its allies. To achieve that, the administration may need to raise the military or economic pressures on Iran, Russia and the Syrian government while pressing for negotiations on a new Syrian political order. Not only should the United States reject Moscows bluffing about Syrian airspace, but also the Trump administration should make clear to Vladimir Putins regime that if it continues to ally itself with Iran in the region, it will forfeit any chance of resetting relations with Washington.

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What happens after the Islamic State is defeated in Iraq and Syria? - Washington Post

New York Times

Why Is the US Killing So Many Civilians in Syria and Iraq? New York Times Also, more strikes have occurred in populated areas, like Mosul, the Islamic State's last stronghold in Iraq. A 500-pound bomb aimed at two snipers there detonated stored explosives, which collapsed a building and killed 105 Iraqi civilians on March 17 ...

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Why Is the US Killing So Many Civilians in Syria and Iraq? - New York Times

Days after Islamic State blitzed through northern Iraq and snatched the city of Mosul in mid-2014, it made a powerful statement of conquest: a bulldozer punched a hole through the sand berm marking the line between Iraq and Syria, an event captured in a polished propaganda video titled Kasr al Hudood Breaking of the Borders.

The demolition, set to the strains of a rousing nasheed, or Islamic chant, and attended by the groups top commanders, underscored Islamic States claim of creating a caliphate based on religion, not national borders.

It also marked the merging of the wars raging through Syria and Iraq and granted the group a sanctuary where it could lick its wounds before mounting fresh attacks on both sides of the Iraqi-Syrian border.

That hole in the berm is now blocked, the militants (at least on the Iraqi side) chased away. In their stead, fighters with the Shiite-dominated auxiliary force known as the Hashd al Shaabi, or Popular Mobilization Units, maintain a lonely vigil over this desolate corner of the desert, their weapons trained upon Islamic State positions on the very edge of Syria.

Nabih Bulos / For The Times

Islamic State's one-time crossing between Iraq and Syria, now blocked.

Islamic State's one-time crossing between Iraq and Syria, now blocked. (Nabih Bulos / For The Times)

Their operation to secure the 372-mile border, they say, is an essential component in the fight against the jihadists. Capturing the site that Islamic State bulldozed with such fanfare is an achievement, but it raises other delicate issues: bickering has broken out among the local forces that have united against Islamic State. Also, the presence of the Hashd has irked Washington and its regional allies, who view the Hashd as a stand-in force for Iran.

Last month, the Hashd launched an offensive against Islamic States supply lines west of Mosul and was able to claw back part of the surrounding Nineveh province from Islamic States dwindling caliphate. The Hashd also captured the town of Baaj, a sand-swept outpost 81 miles southwest of Mosul thought to be the hideout of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr Baghdadi. (The Russian military said Friday it was investigating whether an airstrike in the Syrian desert killed Baghdadi in May.)

The Hashd fighters then grabbed more areas near the border, occasionally pursuing the militants into Syrian territory, reports said, before returning to the Iraqi side of the berm.

Along the berm, Hashd positions fluorescent swaths of color from pup tents set up near battered military vehicles broke the endless desert brown every 200 yards or so.

Last week, the fighters had reached the crossing was where Islamic State had filmed its infamous video.The symbolism was not lost on the irregulars, including Abdul Wahad Ibrahim, a blue-eyed 60-year-old Hashd fighter resting on the berm.

The Hashd has broken the banner of Daesh here, and well continue and do the same over the rest of the border, said Ibrahim, using an Arabic acronym, considered perjorative, for Islamic State. This will cut its breathing space.

But the militants are still close by. As the fighters were plugging the hole in the berm, Ibrahim said, Islamic State attacked their bulldozers with a rocket launched from a row of squat, white buildings less than a mile away in Syrian territory.

The Hashd also found signs of Islamic State in the berm itself. Armed with sniper rifles and heavy machine guns, the fighters had also dug holes in the berm to hide from Iraqi helicopters running sorties.

The Hashds arrival was the first time pro-government forces had reached this area since Islamic State overran northern Iraq more than three years ago.

Though the towns and villages now stand abandoned, vestiges of the groups presence could still be seen: A poster asking militants families to renew their information to receive payments; a road sign directing drivers on a dirt road toward Sham, a reference to Syria; colorful graffiti exhorting people to pray.

This area has been part of the headquarters for the Daesh. If we dont clean it up, it will come back, said Yazan Meshan Juboori, the Hashds political advisor, adding that the operation was launched with the blessing of Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Abadi.

Once the border is secured, Juboori said, it will be handed over to Iraqs border guards. (The U.S., according to coalition spokesman Col. Ryan Dillon, has trained about 5,000 border guards and will supply them in the coming months with police in a box units, prefabricated outposts that come equipped with weapons and uniforms.)

But, Juboori continued, Hashd fighters will remain in place and support the border guards as long as Syria remains unstable.

That plan has stoked fears of a so-called Shiite crescent extending from Iran to Lebanon. Critics say it would give a powerful boost to Syrian President Bashar Assad, whose battered army has relied on Iranian-supported Shiite irregulars, including a number of factions from the Hashd.

This month, the Syrian army and a number of pro-government militias raced from central Syria across the desert and linked up with the Hashd, in what the Syrian armys General Command called a strategic turning point in the war on terror in a statement on Saturday.

This will tighten the noose on what remains of the groupings of Daesh in the area and cuts the supply lines of the organization in more than one direction, the statement said.

But U.S.-backed Kurdish groups on both sides of the border have been less welcoming.

If Hashd forces attempt to enter our areas, our forces will fight them, said Talal Sillo, spokesman for the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, in an interview with media outlet Kurdistan24 last month.

The SDF is a U.S.-backed coalition composed of Kurdish and Arab militiamen who dominate northeastern Syria. They are involved in a large-scale offensive on Islamic States de facto Syrian capital, Raqqah.

The Kurds and Iraqi government have long been at odds, but Kurdish fighting forces known as the peshmerga participated in the run-up to the Mosul offensive on the basis of a vague agreement with Baghdad. As the Kurds see it, some of the border areas in northwestern Iraq now controlled by Hashd would someday come under the administration of the semiautonomous Kurdistan Regional Government, and would presumably be included in any future Kurdish state.

The Hashds advance pushed Kurdish President Massoud Barzani to complain in a meeting with the head of U.S. Central Command, Gen. Joseph Votel, this month that the Hashd shouldnt take control of the area and that its presence goes against the spirit of the agreement the Kurds helped craft in Baghdad.

Nabih Bulos / For The Times

Fighters with the Hashd al Shaabi keep vigil on the berm between Iraq and Syria.

Fighters with the Hashd al Shaabi keep vigil on the berm between Iraq and Syria. (Nabih Bulos / For The Times)

Others question how the Hashd will behave once those local populations uprooted by its offensive return. Many fear the Shiite fighters will engage in sectarian-fueled vengeance against Sunni communities, who were thought to give at least tacit support to Islamic State.

First they remove the military-age males from the environment, and then they set the price for them to come back, said Michael Knights, an analyst with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Will they have to join the PMUs [Popular Mobilization Units]? Do you get a Sunni Hashd there? Do they have to pay compensation? Do they have to hand over a certain number of their sons for summary judgment?

Left unchecked, the tensions will lead to Islamic State (or its future iteration) to take advantage of the lack of cooperation to rise again, said Renad Mansour, an Iraq expert with the U.K.-based Chatham House think tank.

Now everyone is attacking ISIS on both sides of the border so it cant regroup. But in two or three years? said Mansour in a phone interview.

Even if jihadist forces are driven out of the border region, the underlying beliefs and tensions that gave to Islamic State might still remain and the border will remain a volatile place.

Ive ask all the political leaders in [northern Iraq], Are the roots that led to ISIS gone? Mansour said.

Everyone says they havent even been addressed.

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Iraqi forces have taken back a vital conduit from Islamic State, but questions remain - Los Angeles Times

Iraqi Prime Minister Hayder Abadi had made clear he was very interested in staying out of the growing tensions between the Emirate of Qatar and the other GCC member nations. That, however, appears it was not meant to be, as Vice President Ayad Allawi has insinuated himself into the issue.

Allawi, himself a former prime minister of Iraq, today accused Qatar of having promoted a plan to split Iraq along religious lines, saying they sought the establishment of an independent Sunni Iraq in exchange for a Shiite-dominated region.

That would be bad news for Allawi, a secular Shiite politician whose political support is heavily dependent on Sunni voters who see him as preferable to the more religious candidates aligned with the Dawa Party and the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council.

Whether the allegation is true or not is another matter. Qatar, like most of the Gulf Arab states, has been seen trying to limit the Shiite-dominated Iraqi governments influence in the Sunni Arab west, but talk of splitting Iraq outright along these lines never appears to have been a proposal which got very far, let alone one that Qatar ever publicly backed.

While Allawis allegations put him in the same camp with Saudi Arabia et al. in throwing around accusations about Qatar, in this case it appears not to fit neatly into the Saudi narrative, as theyve been trying to paint Qatar as too close to Shiite Iran, and this accusation would have Qatar undermining Irans allies in Baghdad for the sake of the nations Sunni Arab minority.

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Iraq VP Accuses Qatar of Trying to Split Iraq Apart - Antiwar.com

Syrian troops and allied militias met up with Iraqi forces at one crossing point along their shared border Sunday for the first time in years, in a step described as a major achievement by the Syrian military in their fight against the Islamic State group.

The development reported by pro-government media Sunday comes a day after Iraqi forces captured a border crossing point with Syria, al-Waleed, from the IS militants. It was not immediately clear if the Syrian forces reached a new point along their border with Iraq or whether it was the Iraqi forces that had moved northeast of their newly captured point.

The U.S.-led coalition said it was aware of the Iraqi forces' maneuvers along the border, which highlight Baghdad's resolve to fight IS. The maneuvers have no impact on the U.S. presence nearby, a coalition colonel said.

A map by the Central Military Media, allied with the Syrian government, showed Syrian troops at the border with Iraq, northeast of al-Waleed border crossing point with Syria. The Lebanese al-Manar TV linked to Hezbollah, the militia fighting alongside the Syrian government, said Syrian and Iraqi troops linked up at the borders, after the Syrian army seized new territories in its campaign in the Syrian desert.

The Britain-based opposition war monitor group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the Iraqi forces had moved northeast of al-Waleed meeting up with pro-Syrian troops for the first time since 2015. The borders had been controlled by IS since.

A Syrian general on the pro-government al-Ikhbariya TV channel said the campaign in recent weeks seized 25,000 square kilometers (9,600 square miles), reaching the Iraqi borders, calling it a "qualitative operation."

"This is the sign of the cooperation between the brotherly Iraqi and Syrian military leadership to secure the shared borders," the unnamed general told the pro-state TV. The general was interviewed in the desert, in an area purported to be across from where the Iraqi forces are based. Syrian officials were recently in Iraq meeting with defense officials there.

The general said the meeting point for Iraqi and Syrian forces is northeast of Tanf, an area where U.S. troops and Syrian opposition fighters are based, and where they were recently encircled by the Iranian-sponsored pro-Syrian forces.

U.S. Col. Joe Scrocca, the coalition's public affairs director, said the decisions of the Iraqi security forces are "theirs alone," but that they advise the U.S.-led coalition of their operations.

"The Iraq Security Force operation at the al-Waleed crossing further demonstrates their resolve to defeat (IS) throughout all of Iraq," Scrocca said in an email to the Associated Press. "This operation has no bearing on Coalition partner training operations at At Tanf."

The head of the Observatory, Rami Abdurrahman, said the link between Iraqi and Syrian forces will allow Iraqi fighters, including pro-Iran militias, to move inside Syria, joining the Syrian government's campaign against IS strongholds in eastern Syria, Deir el-Zour. Syrian troops have been advancing against IS positions in the desert for weeks.

The Syrian general told the pro-state TV channel that the new meeting point is only 20 kilometers (12 miles) from al-Mayadeen, an IS stronghold where the group has recently relocated much of its leadership.

Sunday's development comes nearly three weeks after Iraq's paramilitary forces mostly Shiite fighters with close ties to Iran referred to as the Popular Mobilization Forces reached the Syrian border in northeastern Iraq.

In recent months the militants have been coming under increasing pressure in Iraq and Syria where they have lost vast parts of the land they declared as a caliphate in Syria and Iraq in June 2014.

Also on Sunday, aid groups said a convoy delivering aid to a besieged opposition area outside Syria's capital has come under attack, seriously wounding a driver of the Syrian Arab Red Crescent and thwarting the first such mission to the area in eight months.

The 37-truck convoy, jointly organized by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Syrian Arab Red Crescent and the United Nations, was to deliver food and medicine to 11,000 people in the town of East Harasta.

An aid worker and a local council in east Harasta said the delivery had already been aborted before the convoy came under attack. The aid worker spoke on condition of anonymity because of regulations against speaking publicly to the media.

In a post on its Facebook page, the Local Council of Harasta said that after the convoy arrived at the town's entrance, government officials said the necessary tools to remove sand berms were not available. The local council said the convoy was forced to turn back before coming under fire from a sniper, which it blamed on government troops.

There was no immediate word from the government.

Some 600,000 Syrians live under siege in different areas, mostly trapped by government forces, according to the U.N.

Associated Press writer Albert Aji in Damascus, Syria contributed to this report.

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Syria, Iraq troops link at border for first time in years - ABC News