Anti-Assad senator secretly visited Syria amid new US strategy

John McCain, prominent US Republican senator and known opponent of the Assad regime, has secretly visited Syria but this time he said nothing about supporting anti-government rebels.

He made the clandestine trip last week, his office confirmed.

McCain had visited Syria in 2013, where he met with anti-Assad rebels in a much-publicised visit. Syria's government that year complained to the United Nations, claiming he entered the country without a visa "in violation of its sovereignty".

But this time, his agenda seems to be different.

The visit, paid for by the US government, could be a routine trip by a man who also serves as chairman of the Senate Committee on Armed Services, Tim Eaton, Middle East and North Africa research fellow at Chatham House, told The New Arab.

Julie Tarallo, a spokeswoman for McCain, told CNN her boss
was in Syria to visit US special forces deployed there and to discuss operations to retake the Islamic State stronghold of Raqqa.

The senator met with US military members and Kurdish fighters in the self-proclaimed Syrian Kurdish territory of Rojava, a first by a US lawmaker.

This comes at a time when the Trump administration is pursuing a major re-think of Obama's Syria strategy, but it is not clear how McCain fits into the push.

President Trump’s developing plan to defeat the Islamic State "may lead to significant alterations in the Syria strategy that Trump inherited from Barack Obama", said the Wahington Post on Wednesday.

This would include a "reduction or elimination of US support for moderate opposition forces fighting against the Syrian government and the use of Syrian Kurdish fighters as the main US proxy force against the militants", said the Post, quoting US officials.

Read more:Turkey's Syria policy: Fighting IS to contain the Kurds

McCain, once a staunch advocate for the removal of the Assad regime, had repeatedly called for his country to take action against the regime. But it has been some time since McCain last reiterated this position.

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His visit -- preceded by a meeting with the Saudi king and followed by a photo-op with Turkey's Erdogan -- appears to fall in line with Trump's new strategy.

“Senator McCain’s visit was a valuable opportunity to assess dynamic conditions on the ground in Syria and Iraq. President Trump has rightly ordered a review of the US strategy and plans to defeat ISIL,” McCain's spokeswoman told The Hill, using another term for IS.

But McCain's alleged support for an American U-turn would be odd, Tim Eaton told The New Arab, given, for one thing, the veteran senator's fierce opposition to many of the new president's policies; and for another, the possibility of US-Russian military cooperation and rehabilitation of Assad, so far anathema to McCain.

Either way, McCain "has no platform to push for a new strategy" of his own, adds Eaton, but his newfound silence on the removal of Assad and declining US support for rebels "is telling".