WASHINGTON // The Pentagon said on Friday it will halt its troubled programme to build Syrian rebel units to fight ISIL and focus instead on training and arming vetted leaders already on the ground.
“The model before was we were training infantry-type units. We are now changing to a model that will produce more military combat capability,” a senior US defence official said.
The official declined to say how many leaders would be armed and trained, but noted the new effort would get under way “within days.”
The switch in tactics will be seen as a tacit admission that the Pentagon’s $500 million programme to train thousands of “moderate” Syrian rebels has failed.
Meanwhile, ISIL militants advanced on Friday to the outskirts of Syria’s second city Aleppo, despite 10 days of Russian air strikes that Moscow says are aimed at routing the jihadists.
Moscow announced on Friday that its raids had killed several hundred ISIL fighters and hit more than 60 “terrorist targets” in Syria over the past 24 hours.
Deputy head of the Russian General Staff Lieutenant Igor Makushev said that “Su-34M and SU-24SM warplanes hit 60 terrorist targets”.
He said Russia had bombed a command post in ISIL stronghold Raqqa, killing two senior field commanders and some 200 fighters, according to intercepted radio communications.
Strikes on Aleppo killed “some 100 militants”, and other raids struck command posts and training camps in Latakia, Hama and Idlib.
Western governments say the vast majority of Russian strikes have targeted rebel groups other than ISIL in an attempt to defend President Bashar Al Assad’s rule.
And despite the Russian raids, ISIL militants have reached their closest position yet to Aleppo in northern Syria, a monitoring group reported.
“Dozens of combatants were killed on both sides” as ISIL drove out rebels from nearby localities as well as a military base, said Rami Abdel Rahman of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The militants are now just over 10 kilometres from the northern edges of Aleppo city and three kilometres from pro-regime forces positioned at the Sheikh Najjar industrial zone.
“IS has never been so close to the city of Aleppo, and this is its biggest advance towards” the country’s pre-war commercial capital, Mr Abdel Rahman said.
Two small groups of US-trained fighters had crossed into Syria from Turkey this year, but one broke up after coming under attack and the other surrendered much of its equipment to an Al Qaeda front group.
Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook said the training programme was only part of the US effort, noting that it has also been arming groups already inside Syria, such as the Kurdish forces defending the border town of Kobani.
“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,” defence secretary Ashton Carter said.
Mr Cook said Mr Carter has directed the military “to 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.”
Speaking at a news conference in London, Mr Carter admitted he had been dissatisfied with the previous training programme, and said: “We have devised a number of different approaches.”
In January, Ppesident Barack Obama’s administration unveiled the $500-million programme to train up to 15,000 vetted Syrian rebels in neighbouring countries.
Recruitment was slow, in particular because the rebels had to pass stringent background checks to weed out extremists and many objected to being forced to pledge to fight only ISIL and not Mr Al Assad’s regime.
Then in July, the first graduating group crossed the border and was promptly attacked by the Al Nusra Front, an Al Qaeda affiliate.
Last month General Lloyd Austin — who heads the US military’s Central Command, which is overseeing efforts against the Islamic State — conceded that only “four or five” Pentagon-trained rebels were engaged in Syria.
The comment attracted derision from US lawmakers, who said the programme should be scrapped altogether. Republican Senator Kelly Ayotte said the low number was a “joke.”
Last month, soon after they were reinserted in Syria following training in Turkey or Jordan, a second group of graduates handed over a quarter of their ammunition and other gear to Al Nusra.
The senior defence official said some training and embedding of rebels would continue to take place, and Mr Carter cited the work US trainers have done with Kurds in northern Syria as an example of how the effort may be focused in the future.
“That’s exactly the kind of example that we would like to pursue with other groups in other parts of Syria going forward,” Mr Carter said.
The training programme was supposed to work with the US-led coalition’s aerial fight against ISIL. For more than a year coalition forces have been flying regular drone and warplane missions against ISIL in Iraq and Syria.
The effort was further complicated last week when Russia began its own bombardment in Syria, ostensibly to hit “terrorists,” though the Pentagon says Moscow is almost exclusively striking opponents of its ally Mr Al Assad.
* Agence France-Presse
