Defence Secretary Ash Carter said the new approach would focus more on enabling forces already on the ground to battle Islamic State (IS).
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A defense official told ABC News that vetted groups will initially receive ammunition and that additional equipment and weapons will be provided to them over time as a group proves its reliability. The closure of the program signals an admission by the administration that it has failed to adequately train Syrian rebel forces to fight against ISIS. The USA president is expected to speak on the matter later on Friday.
Moscow is mounting air strikes and missile attacks that it says are aimed both at supporting its longtime ally Assad and combating Islamic State. “That’s exactly the kind of example that we would like to pursue with other groups in other parts of Syria going forward”.
The change highlights the failure of the Pentagon’s flagship effort in the war against the militant group in Syria.
The irony, of course, being the U.S.-trained rebels reportedly had to pledge to fight only ISIS and not Assad.
The budgeted $500 million for the program remains, he added, but the focus of the training program will shift. She said: “I don’t think at all this was a case of poor execution”.
“We’re going to take sort of an operational pause”, said Pentagon policy chief Christine Wormuth.
Last week, acknowledged the train-and-equip effort “has not worked the way it was supposed to”.
When Congress initially funded the program, there was talk of creating a force of tens of thousands of fighters that would eventually take all of Syria.
The aim, Mr Cook said, is to work with these unspecified units “so that over time they can make a concerted push into territory still controlled by Isil”, using an acronym for Islamic State.
“We are not abandoning it; it still exists”, a Defense Department official, who asked not to be named, told ABC News of the program.
Yet that program is relatively modest when compared to what the Pentagon one once promised, and rebels expressed little hope that there was more robust USA support in store.
“What we want to do coming out of this review is to build on that and work with groups on the ground who are already fighting ISIL and provide them a few equipment to make them more effective, in combination with our airstrikes”, said the official.
The Pentagon did not name which groups would receive support. Syrian Kurds also America s will increase the cooperation.
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Instead of recruiting and vetting moderate Syrian rebels and sending them to training programs in Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the Pentagon will set up a smaller training center in Turkey, where leaders of opposition groups would be taught skills such as calling in airstrikes, the Times reported.
