President Obama made it clear when he laid out his Islamic State (ISIS) strategy that arming and training the Syrian rebels would be a key to success.
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But while the bombing campaign assisting the Kurdish ground forces is up and running, the Syrian rebels remain unarmed and untrained as a Tuesday article in the Daily Beast indicates.
The Daily Beast reported that there will be “no Syrians at Tuesday’s 21-nation coalition meeting on ISIS, as the U.S. makes clear to the existing moderate Syrian rebels they are not part of the mission.”
Reported The Daily Beast:
The U.S. government has no near-term plans to include the Free Syrian Army or any other moderate rebel group in the military mission to fight ISIS. None of these opposition figures were even invited to the anti-ISIS coalition meeting being held at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington and chaired by Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey. U.S. defense officials told The Daily Beast the Syrian rebel groups are simply not partners in the airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, which have been failing to stop the Islamic State’s advances both in northern Syria and western Iraq.
“We’ve said this is an Iraq-first strategy,” Col. Edward Thomas, spokesman for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told The Daily Beast. “We have not yet moved to the stage in Syria where we would work with partners on the ground.”
In other words, either we still don’t know who they are or the planned arming and training has failed up to now — or both.
A Guardian article from last week, quoting a Pentagon spokeswoman, supported the idea that it’s both:
US military officials consider raising a Syrian rebel force crucial for the war aim of ultimately destroying Isis without committing US soldiers and marines to another bloody Middle East ground war. But the Pentagon has yet to even assign a US officer to the task of determining which rebels are trustworthy and capable enough to comprise that force.
This is what Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) warned of after the House pushed the president’s strategy through with the 2001 Iraq War Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) serving as legal justification.
“Half of the men [in the Free Syrian Army] have defected, half of them are now fighting for the jihadists,” Paul said then. “The moderate forces have and will tactically ally with al Qaeda … We could use the AUMF … to attack the same people we’re sending weapons to.”
Paul also predicted a scenario where we’d be fighting our own weapons.
“Being excluded from Tuesday’s coalition meeting is only the latest clear signal to the Syrian Opposition Coalition and the FSA from the Obama administration that they don’t see these groups as a credible or trusted partner in the fight against ISIS,” The Daily Beast piece continued.
Why, again, were the Syrian rebels a crucial part of the strategy to begin with and why did Congress push this through so quickly?