The United States has shelved a program that was meant to train moderate Syrian rebel fighters.
Advertisement
The 500 million dollars (£325 million) Congress provided past year for the programme will be used more for equipping select rebel groups inside Syria, with limited training activity. Last week, a commander of one of the U.S.-trained rebel units turned over a half-dozen USA vehicles to extremist militants.
The new program, the official said, will begin in the next few days, though it may well run into numerous same problems of conflicting loyalties and ancient animosities that helped sink the first effort.
The Russian Defense Ministry has drawn up a blueprint of a joint inter-agency document on operations in Syria’s airspace and forwarded it to the USA, Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said on October 10.
A senior defense official said the remaining training “will be much more minimal” than the previous program. Instead, the administration will now focus on vetting leaders and then providing them with equipment packages for their fighters. “I wasn’t satisfied with the early efforts in that regard”.
Carter said they had “devised a number of different approaches to that going forward”.
The closing of the program comes as the administration’s attention is shifting to northeastern Syria, where it hopes to assemble a group of Sunni tribes in a “Syrian Arab Coalition” to fight alongside Syrian Kurdish forces against the Islamic State.
The fighting is concentrated in Hama and the northern Idlib provinces, where a consortium of mainstream rebels as well as al Qaida’s branch in Syria, the Nusra Front, are operating.
Update at 12:50 p.m. ET.
Individuals in the SAC will be vetted through their leadership and given training and be given expertise in communications and intelligence support.
Daesh (ISIS) advanced in Aleppo, taking several villages and towns from rebel groups in the north of the Syrian province, a monitoring group said Friday.
Syrian troops backed by Russian airstrikes seized a village in central Syria on Saturday amid fierce clashes with rebels, part of a ground offensive launched earlier this week.
Update at 10:50 a.m. ET. USA officials say that effort is having more success than the one run by the military, which only trained militants willing to promise to take on the Islamic State exclusively.
Advertisement
LONDON-U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter said the Pentagon is looking for ways to improve a program to train and equip moderate rebels in Syria, after concluding that the current program was not effective after it produced a small handful of trained rebels to fight Islamic State.
