U.S. abandoning goal of building new Syrian rebel force

The U.S. is abandoning its goal 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, officials said Friday.

The change, which has not yet been officially announced, reflects the failure of the current approach, which has produced only a handful of combat-ready moderate rebels and drawn widespread criticism in Congress.

Officials briefed on the new approach said 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 $500 million US Congress provided last year for the program will be used more for equipping select rebel groups inside Syria, with limited training activity.

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The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to discuss the change publicly.

Under the new approach, the U.S. would provide communications gear, for example, to enable established rebel groups to co-ordinate U.S. 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.

Embarrassing setbacks

The original program 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 U.S. lawmakers who condemned the program as a joke and a failure. A Syrian rebel commander leading the trainees last week handed over a half-dozen vehicles to extremist militants.

U.S. 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.

"The work we've done with the Kurds in northern Syria is an example of an effective approach," U.S. Defence Secretary Ash Carter told a news conference in London without providing any details of the new program. "That's exactly the kind of example that we would like to pursue with other groups in other parts of Syria going forward."

He called it a "more strategic approach" than what the U.S. has been doing from the beginning. "We have been looking for now several weeks at ways to improve that program," Carter said. "I wasn't satisfied with the early efforts in that regard."

Instead of fighting Islamice State in small units, the U.S.-trained rebels would be attached to larger existing Kurdish and Arab forces. They would be equipped with U.S. communications gear and trained to provide intelligence and to designate Islamic State targets for airstrikes in co-ordination with U.S. troops outside of Syria, the officials said.

The top U.S. commander in the Middle East, Gen. Lloyd Austin, acknowledged that the program got off "to a slow start" and he told Congress that he looking at options that would best employ the moderate forces.

Officials have also said the new plan also scales back the number of rebels the U.S. 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.