All of the "they fought along side of us" stuff really pisses me off.

[SuprstitionAintthWay]

37. Our special forces talked with constantly and knew the Kurdish soldiers personally, yes, absolutely.

Last edited Wed Oct 9, 2019, 10:38 PM - Edit history (1)

U.S. special forces on the ground in the Syrian combat zones were the Kurds' "eyes and ears," most heavily with intell from the sky. Satellite photos and videos, manned and drone aircraft still pics and live videos, radio intercepts. We gave them enemy force estimates, coordinates, range-to-target data, and often were even minute by minute advisors.

If the Kurds needed help calling in the big battle-changers, air strikes, our special forces would help with those (but as I understand it many Kurd front line commanders could call in U.S. air strikes entirely on their own).

And we met with the Kurds again for after-action debriefs, assessments, lessons-learned, and new intell.

To do all that, U.S. special forces couldn't be but so far away from the shooting.

But our guys did not "stand shoulder to shoulder" with the Kurds on the ground directly facing off against the Islamic State fighters, because they weren't there to do that. That job was the Kurds'... which they did well, though obviously at a cost.

On the very rare instances any Islamic State fighter got within rifle or RPG range of any American soldier, it was an accident, something had gone wrong, and it certainly didn't last long. If a few stories of isolated incidents of our guys trading direct groundfire with ISIS come out of a 5 year war, no one should be surprised. Mistakes happen. But the design was, the Kurds engage, we direct and advise. And things went according to design.

All of which explains why we suffered next to no casualities, the Kurds suffered large numbers of casualties, and the Islamic State sustained by far the worst casualties of all... just devastating numbers of dead. From air strikes in particular, they had no way to defend themselves and at one pace or another were going to keep losing fighters and ground. But even after ideal air strikes infantry still did have to go in on foot, clean out pockets of resistance and snipers, and secure that ground.

So both U.S. and Kurdish ground forces did their assigned jobs, yes. But those jobs and their attendant levels of exposure to enemy fire were almost unimaginably different... they were worlds apart.

You really couldn't get near our guys in Syria without getting blown up, seriously. A bunch of Russian mercenaries very stupidly tried... I think it was in February? We signalled them not to, and yeah, we knew they were Russians. But the idiots were motivated by capturing valuable property - they got to keep what they took - and thought we'd just back away as they approached. Our warplanes wiped out 200 to 300 Russians in just minutes. (First time that's happened... IDK, ever, maybe?)