Trump Shuts Down CIA Support for Syrian ‘Rebels’ After Years of Chronic Failure By Patrick Poole
https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/2017/07/24/trump-shuts-down-cia-support-for-syrian-rebels-after-years-of-chronic-failure/
The announcement last week that the Trump administration was shutting down the “covert” CIA program of arming Syrian “rebel” groups could not have come too soon.
As I’ve reported here in more than three dozen articles over the past three years, the CIA support program had suffered chronic failures, including defections of groups “vetted” by the CIA to al-Qaeda and ISIS, and leakage of weapons provided by the CIA into the hands of those same terror groups.
The pinnacle of this failure came in Obama’s last few hours in the White House in January. He ordered the bombing of a terror training camp that also hosted fighters from a CIA-“vetted” group embedded with al-Qaeda; that same group officially partnered with al-Qaeda a few days later.
Another defining moment of the debacle came last year, when CIA-backed groups fought against other CIA-backed groups:The Washington Post announced the cancellation of the CIA support program last week, claiming — without evidence — that the move was made to placate Russia:
Predictably, the “rebel” groups began flocking to al-Qaeda as soon as the CIA pipeline began to slow.
In response to the cancellation announcement, cheerleaders of the “vetted moderate rebels” complained that the U.S. hadn’t supported the groups enough. But that talking point was rebutted by Obama nearly three years ago. In an August 2014 interview with Tom Friedman in the New York Times, Obama dismissed the notion that more weapons would have given the “rebels” any kind of edge, and he expressed frustration at the inability to find enough “moderates”:
With “respect to Syria,” said the president, the notion that arming the rebels would have made a difference has “always been a fantasy. This idea that we could provide some light arms or even more sophisticated arms to what was essentially an opposition made up of former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth, and that they were going to be able to battle not only a well-armed state but also a well-armed state backed by Russia, backed by Iran, a battle-hardened Hezbollah, that was never in the cards.”
Even now, the president said, the administration has difficulty finding, training and arming a sufficient cadre of secular Syrian rebels: “There’s not as much capacity as you would hope.”
And yet, just a month later the GOP congressional leadership passed $500 million in additional funds for an eventual U.S.-backed, Pentagon-trained army of 15,000 “vetted moderates” to combat ISIS. In less than a year, that half-billion dollar boondoggle approved by Congress turned into a disaster. By July 2015, fewer than 60 fighters had been successfully vetted and trained — costing taxpayers nearly $4 million for each fighter: CONTINUE AT SITE
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