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  1. #11
    Senior Member JohnDoe2's Avatar
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    U.S. will stop training Syrian rebels and focus on arming Kurds and other groups


    Syrians carry a wounded man after airstrikes, reportedly by Syrian government forces, hit the rebel-held town of Douma on Oct. 2, 2015.
    (Sameer al-Doumy / AFP/Getty Images)



    W.J. Hennigan and Christi Parsons Contact Reporters


    President Obama has decided to end the Pentagon’s failed effort to field its own proxy force in Syria, the administration announced Friday.

    Instead of trying to back a moderate Syrian rebel force that the U.S. would train, the administration will focus on supporting the Kurds and other established rebel groups in the country’s civil war, according to officials familiar with the plan.


    The Pentagon “will provide equipment packages and weapons to a select group of vetted leaders and their units so that over time they can make a concerted push into territory still controlled by ISIL,” Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook said in a statement, referring to the Islamic State militia that has taken control of large parts of northern and eastern Syria and is the main U.S. target in the country.


    “We will monitor the progress these groups make and provide them with air support as they take the fight to ISIL,” Cook said.


    The decision comes amid continued heavy fighting in Syria which underscored the complex, deadly interaction of outside powers that have intervened there along with numerous armed groups that are trying to overthow the government of Bashar Assad while attacking each other.


    Fleeing Syria: A desperate migration

    In the region around Aleppo in northern Syria, Islamic State militants stormed positions held by other rebel militias, according to the group and another organization in the Syrian opposition.

    The Islamic State's media office in Aleppo province said that "soldiers of the Caliphate" had overrun six villages. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a group based in London, described the gains as "one of the largest advances the Islamic State has achieved in Aleppo province for months."


    Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps issued a statement acknowledging that one of its high-ranking commanders, Brig. Gen. Hossein Hamadani, had been killed near Aleppo. Iran and Russia have been the two key allies for Assad in his struggle to hang on to power in Syria.


    The Iranian statement said that Hamadani had been killed "while fulfilling his duty" to "render military advice to the Syrian army and popular forces in their fight against terrorists."

    Russia continued its bombardment of the country, with its defense ministry saying it had carried out 67 sorties against 60 separate targets across northern Syria over the preceding 24 hours. The statement claimed that the strikes had killed 300 militants and two senior Islamic State field commanders.


    Lt. Gen. Igor Makushev, the deputy chief of staff for the Russian military, briefed reporters in Moscow and said the targets included "communication hubs, command posts, fuel stores and terrorist training bases."


    The U.S. has carried out its own airstrikes in Syria, targeting what it says are Islamic State positions. But the Obama administration has been reluctant to get too closely involved in supporting the various warring militias arrayed against Assad.


    Establishing a U.S.-backed proxy force was originally seen as a significant escalation of American involvement, but the program started slowly and never succeeded. The plan involved selecting potential fighters from moderate Syrian rebel groups, taking them out of the country to camps and giving them arms, equipment and basic training.


    The goal was to develop a force that could tackle the Islamic State fighters.


    The effort has been a thorough failure, as officials have conceded.


    Just 125 fighters — originally envisioned to be a force of 5,400 or more — were given six-week training courses before the Pentagon put the effort on hold last month.


    The first 54 recruits were ambushed by the Al Nusra Front, an Al Qaeda affiliate, after they crossed back into Syria. The second class of 71 surrendered much of their U.S.-issued ammunition and trucks to Al Nusra Front fighters in exchange for safe passage.


    The $500-million program initially was envisioned as a three-year plan to recruit, train and equip fighters at training bases in Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.


    Thousands of rebels applied to the program, but each fighter had to be vetted by the U.S military in a process that often could take months. Many were underage or had militant backgrounds, which made them ineligible.


    The host countries objected to the U.S. focus on fighting the Islamic State, saying the training, instead, should focus on ousting Assad. As Obama conceded in a recent news conference, many of the fighters shared that view and objected to U.S. efforts to push them into fighting the Islamic State.


    In the end, only Turkey and Jordan hosted training.


    “We have clearly faced challenges with the train-and-equip program,” said one senior administration official familiar with the discussions.


    The Kurdish militia, backed by U.S. air power, has proved to be a more organized and trained ground force.


    Known as the Popular Protection Units, or the acronym YPG in their native language, they defeated Islamic State forces in the town of Kobani near the Turkish border in January after a yearlong siege that involved coordinating daily with U.S. warplanes.


    In June, the Kurds beat the militants again in the Syrian border town of Tal Abyad and cut a crucial Islamic State supply line for weapons and reinforcements funneling in from Turkey.


    “That’s the kind of more-effective approach we’re looking at,” Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said in a speech in London on Friday.


    NEWSLETTER: Get the day's top headlines from Times Editor Davan Maharaj >>


    “The work we’ve done with the Kurds in northern Syria is an example of an effective approach where you have a group that is capable, motivated on the ground and you can enable their success,” he said. “That’s exactly the kind of example that we’d like to pursue with other groups in other parts of Syria.”


    Carter emphasized that defeating the militants will depend in part on the success of local ground forces against the Islamic State.


    “I believe the changes we are instituting today will, over time, increase the combat power of counter-ISIL forces in Syria and ultimately help our campaign achieve a lasting defeat of ISIL,” he said.


    Under the new approach, the administration will continue to work with a range of groups to capitalize on the successes that Kurdish, Arab and Turkmen groups have had over the past several months in driving Islamic State forces out of parts of the Turkey-Syria border region, officials said.‎


    The U.S. will no longer try to vet individual fighters. Instead, it will provide communication equipment, weapons and ammunition to groups of rebel commanders whom the U.S. will vet in an effort to ensure that they do not have links to extremist groups.

    If the new plan works, those commanders will receive the equipment, distribute it among their units and push into territory controlled by the Islamic State.


    “A lot of this vetting of key leaders has already taken place,” said a senior U.S. defense official, who discussed the plan on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about it.


    Still, officials acknowledged the risk that arms provided to those groups could find their way to other militant organizations the U.S. opposes. To reduce the risk, the U.S. will be providing "more basic kinds of equipment to these groups" rather than offering higher-end materiel, said Christine Wormuth, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and a principal assistant to Carter. Other officials did not rule out offering some of the groups weapons like shoulder-launched missiles in the future.


    The Pentagon said it will monitor the progress the groups make and coordinate with airstrikes as they attack Islamic State forces.


    That approach involves new complications. U.S. aid to the Kurdish fighters in Syria has been a source of tension with Turkey, for example, which sees the Kurds as a threat to their own security. But White House officials insisted that they had discussed the new plans with the Turks.


    "We're working extremely closely with Turkey throughout this process," said Brett McGurk, deputy special presidential envoy to the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL. Several key operations and tactical positions depend on continued Turkish support, he said.


    Meantime, roughly 1,000 recruits are currently waiting to complete training and return to the fight inside Syria, according to U.S. officials. Fighters now at the U.S.-run training camps will remain there for an undetermined amount of time as the Pentagon rolls out its new program, the officials said.


    Of the $500 million Congress appropriated last year for the Pentagon effort, $41.8 million had been spent as of May.


    The decision to end the Pentagon training program does not appear to immediately affect a separate program run by the CIA.

    http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-...009-story.html

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  2. #12
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    Last edited by JohnDoe2; 10-12-2015 at 03:04 PM.
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