USA to Detail Major Changes to Syrian Rebel Training Program

Quoting an anonymous US Department of Defense source, the New York Times reported that the U.S. would no longer recruit Syrian rebels to go through its training programmes in Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates.

In making the decision, the USA drew on the examples of Kobane and Tel Abyad where coalition forces and with Syrian rebels worked together to successfully clean those areas of Daesh militants.

In the statement, Carter said he remains “convinced that a lasting defeat of ISIL in Syria will depend in part on the success of local, motivated and capable ground forces”.

But the program was bumpy, and interference from Al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra, caused problems nearly as soon as the rebels re-entered Syria.

“The proposition that there is a moderate Syrian opposition with enough military potential and-even more importantly-popular support inside Syria to overthrow the Assad government is a myth”, foreign policy experts Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett wrote for Consortium News one year ago. Those enablers will be opposition leaders who can collect intelligence about the location of Islamic State fighters and call in US airstrikes in coordination with existing fighters.

165-a-07-(Defense Under Secretary Christine Wormuth (WOR’-muhth), the Pentagon’s top policy official, in teleconference)-“effective going forward”-Defense Under Secretary Christine Wormuth says the focus is now on equipping and backing Arab, Kurdish and Christian groups in Syria that are already fighting Islamic State militants”. To bolster their campaign, the USA military will directly provide them with ammunition and other equipment to help them push south toward the Islamic State stronghold, officials said.

Carter said the move was a chance to reassess how to achieve the program’s goals.

A senior White House official left the door open for a restart at a later date.

“I wasn’t happy with the early efforts of the program”, Carter said Friday. “So that is exactly the kind of example we’d like to pursue with other groups in other parts of Syria going forward”.

The top USA commander in the Middle East, Gen. Lloyd Austin, acknowledged that the program got off “to a slow start” and he told Congress that he looking at options that would best employ the moderate forces.

Pentagon chief Ash Carter said he had been unhappy with the results of the effort to train Syrians in Turkey and then dispatch them back to their homeland to fight the Islamic State.

What’s more, for Syria observers, the comments were less surprising considering how troubled the program was from the beginning, starting from its premise: that rebels will focus their attention on ISIL instead of the regime of Bashar Al-Assad.