The United States announcement marked a departure from a previous program to train and equip units of fighters at sites outside of Syria, after that program’s disastrous launch this year fanned criticism of President Barack Obama’s war strategy.
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Officials briefed on the new approach said it would focus heavily on equipping and enabling established Kurdish and Arab rebel groups rather than recruiting and vetting a new cadre of moderate rebels, training them at camps in Turkey and Jordan and re-inserting them as an infantry force into Syria.
Defense Secretary Ash Carter said Friday the new Pentagon approach is in line with the administration’s basic formula of leveraging US and coalition airpower by coordinating with anti-IS Syrian rebels on the ground.
“What I can tell you that what we’ve seen so far in terms of Russian military activity and the strikes they’re taking, that they are predominantly against opposition groups”, he said.
U.S. defense minister Ashton Carter gives a press conference during a defense minister meeting at the …
Abdel Rahman said the area is of strategic importance to government forces because it brings them closer to the town of Khan Sheikoun, a stronghold of al-Qaeda affiliate al-Nusra Front, in Idlib.
Last month General Lloyd Austin – who heads the USA military’s Central Command, which is overseeing efforts against the Islamic State – conceded that only “four or five” Pentagon-trained rebels were engaged in Syria.
Meanwhile, hardline Iranian news agency Fars alleged that reports of Russian missiles in the country were fabricated by the U.S. Other major suppliers are Iran and Azerbaijan, with a small amount planned from Turkmenistan.
“We have devised a number of different approaches to that going forward, and taken them to President Obama and you will be hearing I think very shortly from him”, Carter said Friday. “We have been looking for now several weeks at ways to improve that program”, Carter said.
Recruitment was slow, in particular because the rebels had to pass stringent background checks to weed out extremists and many objected to being forced to pledge to fight only the IS jihadist group and not Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Republican Senator Kelly Ayotte said the low number was a “joke”.
Earlier in the day, the U.S. alleged that Russian Federation is targeting moderate opposition groups in Syria.
The training program was supposed to work with the US-led coalition’s aerial fight against IS.
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In the past 24 hours, 55 IS targets in Syria were destroyed during 64 sorties carried out by Russian aircraft, said the ministry. Fighters from the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and Islamic military groups joined forces with ISIS to help saturate large swaths of Syria and Iraq for the borderless caliphate. The US and Russian Federation are trying to hash out flight procedures to ensure that there are no collisions or other incidents as both countries conduct bombing operations in Syria.
