| New York Times | - |
BEIRUT,
Lebanon - The Islamic State registered significant gains Friday in the
area of northwestern Syria that Russian warplanes have been bombing,
taking six villages near Aleppo and threatening to cut off an important
route north to the Turkish border.
Obama Administration Ends Effort to Train Syrians to Combat ISIS
Carter on Pentagon Training Program
The defense secretary, Ashton B. Carter, while appearing with his British counterpart Michael Fallon in London.
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS on Publish Date October 9, 2015.
Photo by Alastair Grant/Associated Press.
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WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Friday abandoned its efforts to build up a new rebel force inside Syria
to combat the Islamic State, acknowledging the failure of its $500
million campaign to train thousands of fighters and announcing that it
will instead use the money to provide ammunition and some weapons for
groups already engaged in the battle.
Defense
Department training sites across the Middle East, including ones in
Turkey and Jordan, will soon suspend almost all operations, officials
said, in favor of a revamped program that briefly screens Arab rebel
commanders of existing Syrian units before equipping them with
much-needed ammunition and, potentially, small arms. Initial airdrops of
equipment could begin as early as this weekend, officials said.
The
decision to scuttle a central piece of President Obama’s strategy for
confronting extremists in Syria was made after mounting evidence that
the training mission has resulted in no more than a handful of
American-coached fighters. And it comes amid Russia’s forceful entry into the Syrian conflict, a move by President Vladimir V. Putin that has highlighted the lack of progress by the United States and its coalition.
Graphic
Syrian Government Capitalizes on Russian Airstrikes
Pro-government forces pushed north along several routes
Thursday in a heavily contested region of northeastern Syria.
Senior
officials at the White House and Pentagon admitted that the strategy to
pull fighters out of Syria, teach them advanced combat skills and
return them to face the Islamic State had simply not worked, in part
because many of the rebel groups were more focused on fighting the
Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad.
But
officials said they were trying to adapt in real time by seeking to
identify the leaders of “capable, indigenous forces” in Syria who would
sign a pledge to fight the Islamic State group, receive some instruction
on human rights, review the law of armed conflict, and leave with
communications gear and some help on how to call in airstrikes.
Officials
said the provision of equipment to the groups would be limited at
first, but could grow depending on a rebel group’s performance. Failure
on the battlefield or the loss of weapons that could fall into the hands
of extremists could trigger a cutoff of military equipment, officials
said. The American military has confirmed that some rebel groups had
surrendered their weapons when confronted by extremists, and acknowledge
that accounting for American-supplied arms across the battlefield had
proved almost impossible in the past.
The
new program would mark the first time the Pentagon has provided lethal
aid directly to Syrian rebels, though the C.I.A. has for some time been
covertly training and arming groups fighting Mr. Assad.
“We
need to be flexible. We need to be adaptive,” said Brett McGurk, a top
adviser to Mr. Obama on the fight against the Islamic State, also known
as ISIS
or ISIL. He added later, “Is it best to take those guys out and put
them through training, or to keep them on the line fighting and give
them equipment and support?”
For
Mr. Obama, Friday’s answer to that question was a reversal of policy
that underscored a harsh reality — tens of billions of dollars spent in
recent years to train security forces across Middle East, North Africa
and South Asia have rarely succeeded in transforming local fighters into
effective, long-term armies.
The
president has long expressed skepticism that training Syrian rebels
could resolve the political and military challenges in that country. Mr.
Obama’s advisers insisted that he remained committed to a broader
strategy in Syria that seeks to destroy the Islamic State even as the
United States and allies pursue a political transition that pushes Mr.
Assad out of power. But Mr. Obama’s critics seized on the admission of
failure in the training program to demand a new strategy.
“The
administration has had a weak, inadequate policy in Syria and a weak,
inadequate policy against ISIS,” said Representative Mac Thornberry,
Republican of Texas and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.
“Adjusting one program, even if it were successful, will not solve the
problem.”
Senator
John McCain of Arizona, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services
Committee, said the shift in strategy was doomed because the United
States is unwilling to support rebels fighting against Mr. Assad as well
as against the Islamic State. He called it “inexplicable that the
administration acknowledges this problem yet refuses to fix it.”
Graphic
How Syrians Are Dying
Over four years of war has forced more than four million
to flee the country, fueling a migrant crisis in the Middle East and
Europe.
In
a letter to the State Department, the Pentagon and the C.I.A. last
week, four senators — three Democrats and a Republican — criticized the
program. “The Syria Train and Equip Program goes beyond simply being an
inefficient use of taxpayer dollars,” the senators wrote. “As many of us initially warned, it is now aiding the very forces we aim to defeat.”
The
letter referred to a recent incident in which some of the
American-trained Syrian fighters gave at least a quarter of their United
States-provided equipment, including six pickup trucks and a portion of
its ammunition, to the Qaeda affiliate in Syria, the Nusra Front.
White
House and Defense Department officials said Friday that the equipment
to be provided to the rebel groups would not include antitank rockets or
other high-end equipment that could eventually cause serious damage if
they fall into the hands of groups that commit acts of terrorism against
the United States or its allies.
“We
are very careful to provide support to groups who are not involved in
that type of activity,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, the deputy national
security adviser.
Pentagon
officials on Friday announced what they called the “operational pause”
in the training program as Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter left
London after meetings with his British counterpart, Michael Fallon,
about the continuing wars in Syria and Iraq. Officials said they held
out the possibility that some training might resume.
“I
wasn’t happy with the early efforts” of the program, Mr. Carter said
during a news conference with Mr. Fallon. “So we have devised a number
of different approaches.”
The
changes make official what those in the Pentagon and elsewhere in the
administration have been saying in the wake of revelations that the
program at one point last month had only “four or five” trainees
fighting in Syria — a far cry from the plan formally started in December
to prepare as many as 5,400 fighters this year, and 15,000 over the
next three years.
“There
are many, many individuals in Syria who want to fight the regime,” said
Christine E. Wormuth, the under secretary of defense for policy. “We
were focused on identifying individuals who wanted to fight ISIL. And
that’s a pretty challenging recruiting mission.”
Several
dozen opposition fighters already at the training sites are likely to
complete their instruction — learning to help call in allied airstrikes
and operate 122-millimeter mortars — and they will be placed in
opposition groups in Syria to enhance their combat effectiveness,
officials said.
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But
even as they shutter the existing program, the administration is hoping
to bolster groups already fighting in Syria. In part, American
attention is shifting to northeastern Syria, where it hopes to assemble a
group of Sunni tribes in a “Syrian Arab Coalition” to fight alongside
Syrian Kurdish forces against the Islamic State.
Anti-Assad
insurgents say they have never heard of a group called the Syrian Arab
Coalition, though they welcome the prospect of increased support. “We
have received large promises surrounding future military aid, and we
really did begin to receive equipment,” a spokesman for Thuwwar
al-Raqqa, a Sunni group that has worked with the Kurds, told the website
Syria Direct.
But
many Arabs, especially in northeastern Syria where there are large
Kurdish populations, are wary of the Kurds’ project to create
semiautonomous areas, and have accused Kurdish militias of carrying out
ethnic cleansing in the mixed area.
Ahmad
Abu Bakr, an activist from Raqqa who was reached in Idlib, said that he
had not heard of the Syrian Arab Coalition, but that he was against any
movement to cooperate with the Kurds. “For us, they are an enemy, not a
friend,” he said.
Even
some Arabs who defected from the Syrian Army have refused to join the
group, he said. Kurds were part of the campaign “because the Americans
will be sending powerful weapons only if the Kurds are part of it,” he
said. “The U.S. doesn’t trust anyone except the Kurds.”
The
new program will only arm Arab groups, and not Kurdish forces, out of
deference to Turkish concerns, officials said. American officials said
Friday that coalition air power would support the new Syrian Arab allies
on the ground, just as those planes have helped Syrian Kurdish fighters
over recent months.
The
new program will begin in the next few days, officials said. While many
details still need to be worked out, Mr. Obama endorsed the shift in
strategy at two high-level meetings with his national security and
foreign policy advisers last week.
The
administration was expected to provide classified briefings to
lawmakers and their senior aides on Capitol Hill on Friday to explain
the changes to the train-and-equip program.
Andrew J. Tabler, an expert on Syria at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy,
said the failure of the training mission was another example of the
United States misunderstanding the real dynamic in a foreign country.
“The
opposition and their regional backers wanted the program, they just
couldn’t accept ISIS as the priority and U.S. ambiguity on taking out
Assad,” Mr. Tabler said. “Like in the Iraq war, you can’t expect people
to fight on your behalf unless you give them what they want. We got the
politics wrong yet again.”
Correction: October 9, 2015
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this story misstated the region of Syria to which the Obama administration is shifting its attention. It is northeastern Syria, not northwestern.
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this story misstated the region of Syria to which the Obama administration is shifting its attention. It is northeastern Syria, not northwestern.
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