"President Obama has ordered the Pentagon to find and kill the leaders of an al-Qaeda-linked group in Syria that the administration had largely ignored until now and that has been at the vanguard of the fight against the Syrian government," Adam Entous of The Washington Post reported Thursday, citing US officials.
The move has marked a dramatic shift in the US' priorities in Syria.
Political analyst Mikhail Smolin of the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies told Radio Sputnik that the media outlet's report has not been yet confirmed by US officials.
However, Washington has good reason for cracking down on the terrorist group, according to the expert.
"It seems to me that there is growing disenchantment with this group [al-Nusra Front] in the US," Smolin noted.
Smolin called attention to the fact that practically all Islamist groups financed by the US had sooner or later got out of control. As a result, Washington had ended up fighting against them. A strikingly similar situation is unfolding now in Syria: the US has realized that it has little if any control over al-Nusra Front, the Russian expert underscored.
He highlighted that following Trump's win it became clear to the US establishment that the American people supported Trump's foreign policy approach toward Syria.
Trump is going to fight against Daesh, not against Bashar al-Assad, Smolin stressed.
Indeed, in his article Entous suggested that the recent shift in Obama's strategy toward Syria is "likely to accelerate once President-elect Donald Trump takes office."
Trump has repeatedly stated that in Syria he will be focused on defeating Islamists in the first place.
"Assad is secondary, to me, to ISIS [Daesh]," Trump said, as cited by the Los Angeles Times, "What we should do is focus on ISIS. We should not be focusing on Syria."
Furthermore, then the Republican presidential nominee warned that if the Syrian opposition topples Assad, the country could end up in worse hands.
"We are backing rebels — we don't know who the rebels are. If they ever did overthrow Assad… you may very well end up with worse than Assad," Trump emphasized during the third and final debate with Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in Las Vegas, Nevada.
According to the journalist, increased drone strikes against al-Nusra Front are meant to send a message to "more-moderate rebels," including those backed by the CIA "to distance themselves from the al-Qaeda affiliate."
However, there are those among US officials which oppose the decision to crackdown on al-Nusra Front. They believe that by eliminatinghe group Washington will indirectly help Assad's army catch a second wind.
After his victory in the November election Trump has reiterated that he has no appetite for attacking the Syrian president.
If the Pentagon were to attack Assad, "we would end up fighting Russia, fighting Syria," he stressed.
"My attitude was you're fighting Syria, Syria is fighting ISIS [Daesh], and you have to get rid of ISIS. Russia is now totally aligned with Syria, and now you have Iran, which is becoming powerful, because of us, is aligned with Syria…. Now we're backing rebels against Syria, and we have no idea who these people are," Trump emphasized in his Friday interview with The Wall Street Journal.
