Obama folds effort to train ‘moderate’ Syrians

“I’m the first one to acknowledge it has not worked the way it was supposed to.”

Politico

President Barack Obama is pulling the plug on his year-old attempt to train a so-called moderate force of Syrians to battle the Islamic State, officials said Friday. Instead the military will “refocus” its efforts as U.S. policy there continues to founder.

Senior defense officials told reporters traveling with Defense Secretary Ash Carter in London that the U.S. Central Command would change its strategy to “enable” Kurdish and other combatants who’ve proven their mettle against the Islamic State after months of tough fighting in northern Syria.
Story Continued Below

So rather than persist with an attempt to recruit a roughly brigade-sized unit of Syrians, train them and then set them loose against ISIL, American troops will train the “enablers” to talk with U.S. warplanes and call in airstrikes, defense officials say.

“This focus on equipping and enabling will allow us to reinforce the progress already made in countering ISIL in Syria,” Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook said in a statement Friday. Although mindful of the track record on the program, he also sought to condition expectations for how effective the new effort might be.

“As we have said from the beginning, the fight against ISIL will take time,” Cook said. “Working with local partners to win back territory taken by ISIL will continue to be a long and arduous process.”

Carter told reporters that Obama would make an announcement about the change in strategy, but the White House said on Friday morning that no such announcement was planned.

The so-called New Syrian Force policy never had much public support in Washington and quickly became an orphan this year when the Pentagon had to acknowledge its first cadre of troops had all been killed, captured or scattered. Then Gen. Lloyd Austin, head of the Central Command, acknowledged to Congress that only “four or five” U.S.-trained fighters were at large in Syria.

The Pentagon “paused” the program following that embarrassment, but the problems didn’t end. Later, a group of U.S.-backed troops had to surrender ammunition, vehicles and equipment to a terror group linked with Al Qaeda in order to get safe passage through a contested area of Syria.

A secret CIA-run program to train Syrian rebels fighting the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad has also come under direct attack from Russian airstrikes, which have targeted the weapons and supplies provided by the U.S. and other foreign powers.

There are conflicting reports about the numbers of CIA-backed fighters killed or hurt. But Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, has said he knows from his own sources in Syria that fighters linked to the U.S. have died.

Obama and White House officials have mocked calls for the U.S. to support Syrian rebels against Assad or ISIL, including most recently at the president’s press conference last Friday.

“I’m the first one to acknowledge it has not worked the way it was supposed to,” he said.

Even so, the administration asked Congress for $600 million to continue the “New Syrian Force,” which lawmakers endorsed in the defense authorization bill they passed this week and sent to the president. Obama has threatened to veto that legislation over other objections.