Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said at a press conference Friday in London after a meeting with British counterpart Michael Fallon, “I wasn’t happy with the early efforts” of the program, according to the Times.
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In January, President Barack Obama’s administration unveiled the $500-million program to train up to 15,000 vetted Syrian rebels in neighboring countries.
In the face of its brutal offensive through northern Iraq in June, 2014, Obama asked Congress for an initial $500 million to “train and equip” Syria’s opposition fighters, whom he later described as “the best counterweight” to Islamic militants and a key pillar in his campaign to defeat them.
Instead, it would establish a smaller training centre in Turkey, where “enablers” — mostly leaders of opposition groups — would be taught operational manoeuvres like how to call in air strikes, the newspaper said.
The program had been criticized from the beginning, with many charging that the strategy would merely lead to deeper chaos and regional instability-all while being based on mistaken assumptions. They would be equipped with US communications gear and trained to provide intelligence and to designate Islamic State targets for airstrikes in coordination with USA troops outside of Syria, officials said.
“That’s exactly the kind of example that we would like to pursue with other groups in other parts of Syria going forward”, Carter said.
“Training thousands of infantry was not the right model, I think that’s become pretty clear”, said another senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal planning. “That’s one way we’ll try to mitigate the risk because we aren’t vetting with each fighter”, Wormuth said.
Part of the challenge with the program has been finding fighters willing to combat the Islamic State group, also known as ISIS or ISIL, and not the government of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.
Over 200 rebels were trained under this programme.
The U.S. has already had a few success working, for example, with Syrian Arab rebel groups. “We now have an opportunity to reevaluate our strategy in Syria and find a new path forward that supports our interests in the region, degrades ISIL and helps bring stability to the region, and addresses the plight of the more than 4 million Syrian refugees”. US military support to these groups started past year during the battle over Kobani. Others fled, disbanded or were killed in combat.
The US will also no longer be recruiting moderate rebels, The New York Times reported. A second class yielded only a small number of new fighters, drawing criticism from United States policymakers who condemned the programme as a joke and a failure.
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The United States was now looking at “different” ways to “enable capable, motivated forces on the ground to retake territory from ISIL and reclaim Syrian territory from extremism”, he added, using another acronym for IS.
