The US is abandoning its $500m-scheme of training a new force of moderate Syrian rebels and will focus on equipping and supporting established rebels groups already fighting against the Islamic State group inside Syria, New York Times reported quoting officials on Friday.
The change, expected to be announced later on Friday, reflects the failure of the current approach, which has produced only a handful of combat-ready moderate rebels and drawn widespread criticism in Congress.
US Defence Secretary Ash Carter, after meetings with his British counterpart Michael Fallon in London, also hinted about the major overhaul of the policy, reported Reuters. He told journalists that the new approach would focus more on enabling forces already on the ground to battle Islamic State.
Quoting Department of Defence officials briefed on the new approach, news agency AP reported that 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 into Syria. The $500m million Congress provided last year for the programme will be used more for equipping select rebel groups inside Syria, with limited training activity.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorised to discuss the change publicly.
Under the new approach, the US would provide communications gear, for example, to enable established rebel groups to coordinate US airstrikes in support of their ground operation, the officials said. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because details of the shift in approach had not yet been announced.
In May, the US military began training for up to 5,400 fighters a year in what was seen as a test of Pentagon’s strategy of having local partners combat Islamic State militants and keep US troops off the front lines.
But the programme was troubled from the start, with some of the first class of less than 60 fighters coming under attack from al-Qaeda’s Syria wing, Nusra Front, in their battlefield debut.
The original programme was beset with a series of embarrassing setbacks. The first group of trainees largely disbanded soon after they were sent into combat; some were captured or killed, while others fled. A second class yielded only a small number of new fighters, drawing criticism from US lawmakers who condemned the programme as a joke and a failure. A Syrian rebel commander leading the trainees last week handed over a half-dozen vehicles to extremist militants.
US officials have said the new effort would focus more on embedding recruits with established Kurdish and Arab units, rather than sending them directly into front-line combat.
Defence Secretary Carter called it a “more strategic approach” than what the US has been doing from the beginning. “We have been looking for now several weeks at ways to improve that programme,” Carter said. “I wasn’t satisfied with the early efforts in that regard.”
Instead of fighting IS in small units, the US-trained rebels would be attached to larger existing Kurdish and Arab forces. They would be equipped with US communications gear and trained to provide intelligence and to designate Islamic State targets for airstrikes in coordination with US troops outside of Syria, the officials said.
Officials have also said the new plan also scales back the number of rebels the US expects to train from the initial 5,400 per year to a much smaller total. It also would streamline the vetting process designed to weed out terrorist infiltrators.
