Elizabeth Dent joins Biden team to work on defeat ISIS issues
WASHINGTON, US (North press) – Elizabeth Dent, an American scholar with the Middle East Institute’s Countering Terrorism and Extremism program, joined the Biden-Harris admin to work on Defeat ISIS issues at the Pentagon on Monday.
Between 2014 and 2019, Dent held several counter-terrorism-related positions in the US State Department in the administrations of Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump.
In October 2019, when the former US President Donald Trump announced a partial withdrawal of US forces from northeast Syria, Dent was one of the figures who expressed her anger. She published an article in the Atlantic newspaper with General Joseph Votel, the former US Central Command, defending the importance of the US presence in northeast Syria.
Dent stressed the necessity of keeping the partnership with Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
“In northeastern Syria, we had one of the most successful partnerships,” said Dent in her article, adding that this partnership succeeded in defeating ISIS after a set of failed experiments to defeat it in Syria, while a training program for moderate Syrian opposition militants failed to push towards the fight against ISIS.
“We had tried many other options first. The U.S. initially worked to partner with moderate Syrian rebel groups, investing $500 million in a train-and-equip program to build their capabilities to fight against ISIS in Syria. That endeavor failed, save for a small force in southeastern Syria near the American al-Tanf base, which began as a U.S. outpost to fight ISIS and remains today as a deterrent against Iran. So we turned to Turkey to identify alternative groups, but the Pentagon found that the force Turkey had trained was simply inadequate and would require tens of thousands of U.S. troops to bolster it in battle. With no public appetite for a full-scale U.S. ground invasion, we were forced to look elsewhere,” Dent added at the time.
The joint article of Elizabeth Dent with Joseph Votel described the first meeting between Votel and Mazloum Abdi, the SDF Commander-in-Chief as the defining moment in which the United States found the right partner for cooperation to defeat ISIS.
“It was obvious he was not only an impressive and thoughtful man, but a fighter who was clearly thinking about the strategic aspects of the campaign against ISIS and aware of the challenges of fighting a formidable enemy,” Votel said.
In her recent tweets, Dent noted to the return of ISIS to its terrorist activities in the areas of Deir ez-Zor and other Syrian and Iraqi areas through the so-called “al-Hisba” institution that interferes with the social freedoms of civilians or through sleeper cells that occasionally carry out terrorist attacks.