The Obama administration has announced that 400 U.S. Army soldiers will be deployed in Middle Eastern countries to train more than 5,000 “moderate” Syrian rebels.
Support systems and personnel also will be deployed at the training bases in Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar, according to Defense Dept. spokeswoman Elissa Smith.
President Barack Obama has maintained a policy that no American soldiers will set foot in Syria to help put an end to the civil war that has raged almost four years and has turned the Islamic State into a household world.
Obama apparently has decided on training rebels since the American-led aerial campaign against ISIS has not stopped the beheaders from actually taking over more territory in Syria.
The war has attracted the participation of almost every big-name terrorist group in the world, and each rebel group has appeared to be as barbaric as the army of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
There are apparently enough surviving “moderates” whom officials in the Obama administration want to train, but Reuters reported that it will take 15,000 rebels to take back territory held by the Islamic State (ISIS), which has become Obama’s favorite target in the Middle East, even more than the ‘peace process.”
He also has authorized 3,000 troops to act as advisers in Iraq, which was supposed to have become a freedom-loving democracy long ago as a result of the American foreign policy program.
Now all the U.S. Army has to do is figure which rebel is a fighter and not a terrorist, meaning which one is “moderate” by not belonging to ISIS or Al Qaeda.
“We … know the Syrian opposition better now than we did two years ago through the programs we’ve had providing non-lethal assistance,” Smith said.
In the understatement of the day, an unidentified senior defense official told Defense One, “This is going to be hard. We have to recruit the guys; we have to assume that there are a lot of guys who are recruitable; there’s got to be some vetting. This is not going to be an easy enterprise here.”