Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, right, during a meeting with his British counterpart, Michael Fallon, left, about continuing wars in Syria and Iraq, at the British Ministry of Defense in London, Oct. 9, 2015. The Obama administration has ended the Pentagon’s $500-million program to train and equip Syrian rebels, administration officials said Friday, in an acknowledgment that the beleaguered program had failed to produce any kind of ground combat forces capable of taking on the Islamic State in Syria.ROYAL AIR FORCE SGT ROSS TILLY
U.S. President Barack Obama's administration scrapped its costly but ineffective scheme to recruit, train and equip Syrians keen to fight Islamic State on Friday, admitting that hundreds of millions spent and years of effort had failed to put more than a handful of "boots on the ground."
As Russian warplanes pounded a range of rebel targets for the fifth day in support of a major offensive by the Syrian military still loyal to President Bashar al-Assad's regime, top administration officials were admitting that the Pentagon's effort to create an army inside a war zone had failed.
Mr. Obama admitted as much last week.
"I'm the first one to acknowledge it has not worked the way it was supposed to," he said. Referring to Islamic State by an older acronym, he added: "A part of the reason, frankly, is because when we tried to get them to just focus on ISIL, the response we get back is, 'How can we focus on ISIL when, every single day, we're having barrel bombs and attacks from the regime?' "
Officially the $500-million (U.S.) train-and-equip scheme, which put only a few dozen fighters in action, has been only "paused," but senior officials admitted the basic strategy has been scrapped.
No longer will the U.S. seek to individually recruit, vet, train and equip supposedly moderate, secular, democratically inclined fighters who are willing to agree to combat Islamic State, the militant Sunni group that has carved a nascent caliphate out of western Iraq and eastern Syria.
Instead, the Pentagon will seek to back existing rebel groups such as the Kurds who – with the help of U.S. air strikes – retook the border city of Kobani from Islamic State earlier this year.
"The work we've done with the Kurds in northern Syria is an example of an effective approach," U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter said in London. "That's exactly the kind of example that we would like to pursue with other groups in other parts of Syria going forward."
Christine Wormuth, a senior Pentagon policy official, said in a briefing that the new strategy will focus on backing "capable indigenous forces on the ground" in Syria.
Ideological vetting will be limited to commanders, rather than individual fighters, and there will be no provision of sophisticated weaponry such as anti-tank missiles or shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles – both desperately sought by the anti-Assad rebels who now face attacks from sophisticated Russian warplanes as well as indiscriminate bombing by Syrian helicopters that drop barrels of high explosives.
Dozens of disparate rebel forces – some local with only a few-score fighters, others better organized and with thousands of battle-hardened troops – are fighting the Assad regime along myriad fronts in Syria.
Instead of recruiting fighters and taking them off the battlefield for training, the new plan is to "work with groups on the ground who are already fighting ISIL and provide them some equipment to make them more effective, in combination with our air strikes," Ms. Wormuth said.
Even as they were admitting failure, the U.S. officials were heaping scorn on the newly launched Russian air war in concert with thousands of Syrian troops loyal to the Assad regime.
"The Russian actions are extraordinarily counterproductive," said Ben Rhodes, Mr. Obama's deputy national security adviser. "Russia is targeting opponents of the Assad regime who are not extremists," he added.
Scrapping the effort to recruit a fighting force focused solely on battling Islamic State, in the middle of the far larger Syrian civil war that has now killed more than 250,000 and driven more than 11 million people from their homes, was the latest setback for Mr. Obama's broader war strategy.
The limited effectiveness of air strikes in the absence of boots of the ground to take and hold territory has been evident for months in Syria.
Earlier this month, the Afghan army was routed by Taliban forces in the northern city of Kunduz. The U.S. had spent more than $65-billion (U.S.) over a decade to train and equip the Afghan army, and it was supposed to be ready to provide security throughout the country.
Mr. Obama, who wanted to follow the complete pullout of all U.S. forces from Iraq – which some critics blame for the rise of Islamic State – with a similar pull-out of the last 10,000 U.S. troops from Afghanistan this year, is under pressure to leave them there to prop up the Afghan army in the wake of the Kunduz debacle.
In Syria, the administration is sticking by its broad two-pronged strategy: that Mr. al-Assad must go and that defeating Islamic State depends on local forces as well as U.S. air power.
"I remain convinced that a lasting defeat of ISIL in Syria will depend in part on the success of local, motivated, and capable ground forces," Mr. Carter said. "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."