Secret US-Syrian dialogue for coordinating counter-ISIS operations in Syria led up to Obama speech

The Syrian officers, on the authority of President Bashar Assad, met on the quiet several times with American officers in the capital of one of the Gulf emirates – most probably Muscat in Oman – to prepare the ground for the US and coalition to extend the military campaign against IS into Syria. Tehran was almost certainly in on the dialogue, which brought together US and Syrian officials for the first time in the nearly four years of the Syrian civil war.

But it must be taken for granted that the ISIS commander, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, who has proved to be a competent military tactician, will not leave his troops in place to wait for US bombers, but has already moved them to safe hideouts, either in the mountains of northern Syria, the Syrian desert that spreads over into Iraq, or in the dense vegetation on the banks of the Euphrates River, good places from which to conduct protracted guerilla warfare.

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