US President Barack Obama will overhaul Washington’s approach to supporting Syrian militant following this year’s deeply troubled launch of a United States military training program, Defense Secretary Ash Carter said Friday, according to Reuters.
Advertisement
An anonymous Defense Department source told The New York Times that they would no longer recruit Syrian “moderate” rebels into training programs across the region, but that instead a more compact training center would be instructed in operational maneuvers.
It was created to provide a counterweight to both the Assad regime in Syria as well as radical groups like Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS, by providing USA training to moderate Syrian rebels.
“The work we’ve done with the Kurds in northern Syria is an example of an effective approach”, Carter said, referring to how USA air support has partnered with Kurdish ground troops to successfully fight ISIL.
While many details of the new approach still need to be worked out, President Obama endorsed the shift in strategy at two high-level meetings with his national security and foreign policy advisers last week, several American officials said.
Past year Congress approved $500 million to train and equip “moderate” Syrian rebels to fight and weaken ISIS in Syria. “We now change to a form that would lead to larger military combat capabilities”, a USA official said.
“We will also be looking for other groups on the ground who are fighting ISIL”, the official stated.
Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook said in a statement that the plan was to supply rebel groups so that they could “make a concerted push into territory still controlled by ISIL”. “That’s exactly the kind of example that we’d like to pursue with other groups in other parts of Syria”.
A senior United States defence official said: “The model before was we were training infantry-type units”.
“This problem, compounded by the administration’s immoral refusal to protect those we train from Putin’s bombs, could doom this new effort to the same failure as the previous one”, McCain said.
The Pentagon said it planned to issue a statement about the new direction for the Syria operation, and administration officials were expected to host a conference call in the afternoon. Lindsey Graham said the program was bound for failure from the start. “We will continue to support the fighters we already have”.
The final nail in the coffin seemed to occur during a September 16 hearing when Gen. Lloyd Austin, chief of US Central Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that there were only “four or five” trainees now operating in Syria.
Advertisement
“At the same time, we have seen opportunities emerge where we’ve been able to equip forces fighting ISIL on the ground in Syria and seen them make significant gains, particularly in northeastern Syria”, Rhodes said.
