Rear Admiral John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, said more than 400 U.S. troops will move into training sites in Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey in the coming weeks, Reuters reported.
The goal is to train more than 5,000 Syrian fighters in the first year to push back against Islamic State militants who have gained control of large swathes of Syria and Iraq. It could take as many as 15,000 rebels to recapture the area from the Islamic State, Reuters reported.
Now the U.S. is tasked with the difficult challenge of identifying rebels who do not have ties to ISIL or al Qaeda.
“This is going to be hard,” an unidentified senior defense official told Defense One. “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.”
Pentagon officials said they are confident U.S. forces can recruit and train a moderate fighting force.
“We… know the Syrian opposition better now than we did two years ago through the programs we’ve had providing non-lethal assistance,” Cmdr. Elissa Smith, a Defense Department spokesperson, told the Army Times.
In addition to trainers, the U.S. will deploy hundreds of additional military personnel as “enabling forces” that will provide security and other support at the training sites, reported Defense One.
The move comes amid complaints that President Barack Obama’s administration has taken too long to provide assistance to besieged moderate forces in Syria. That delay in action has caused some rebel forces who would be candidates for training to become disillusioned in the battle against ISIL.
Moreover, removing fighters from the front lines so they can be trained by U.S. forces could be detrimental to the fight inside Syria.
At the same time, there is growing recognition that U.S.-led airstrikes, nearly 800 over recent months, have not stopped ISIL from capturing territory.
