US to abandon training for Syrian rebels

 The Free Syrian Army is among the moderate rebel groups which have received training from the US

The Free Syrian Army is among the moderate rebel groups which have received training from the US

The US is to end its efforts to train new Syrian rebel forces and says it will shift to providing equipment and weapons to existing forces.

Its $500m programme was heavily criticised after it emerged that US-trained rebels had handed vehicles and ammunition over to extremists.

It emerged last month that only four or five of the fighters were in Syria.

The Pentagon says help will now be provided to “a select group of vetted leaders and their units”.

The programme had aimed to train and equip 5,400 fighters this year and a further 15,000 in 2016.

Of the initial two groups sent into the country, the first was rounded up by Jabhat al-Nusrah, an offshoot of Al-Qaeda, in July. The second handed much of its equipment over to the same group in September, reportedly in exchange for safe passage.

Quoting an anonymous Defence Department source, the New York Times reported that the US would no longer recruit Syrian rebels to go through its training programmes in Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates.

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 airstrikes, the newspaper said.

The failure of the programme underscores the wider problem of the inability to create large and effective moderate forces on the ground.

It will also have wider repercussions since the programme helped to coordinate support activities between the Americans, the Gulf States, Turkey, and Jordan.

The risk now is that those countries may push on with more separate initiatives backing individual client groups.

Washington was already limited in its ability to influence events on the ground. The failure of this initiative will reduce it even further.

Speaking in a joint press conference with his UK counterpart, Michael Fallon, Mr Carter admitted that he “wasn’t satisfied with the early efforts” of the training.

The US 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.

Russian missile ‘malfunction’

Mr Carter also said there were indications that four Russian cruise missiles that crashed in Iran before reaching their targets in Syria had malfunctioned.

BBC

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