US Weighs ’Expanded’ CIA Training, Arming of Militants in Syria: Washington Post
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The Obama administration has been weighing plans to escalate the CIA's role in arming and training militants in Syria, a move aimed at accelerating covert US support to "moderate" militant factions while the Pentagon is preparing to establish its own training bases, US officials said as Washington Post published on Friday.
US Weighs 'Expanded' CIA Training, Arming of Militants in Syria: Washington Post
The proposed CIA buildup would expand a clandestine mission that has grown substantially over the past year, US officials said.
The agency now vets and trains about 400 militants each month - as many as are expected to be trained by the Pentagon when its program reaches full strength late next year [2015], the Washington Post wrote.
The prospect of expanding the CIA program was on the agenda of a meeting of senior national security officials at the White House recently last week.
A White House spokesman meanwhile declined to comment on the meeting or to address whether officials had reached a decision on the matter.
A decision to expand the CIA program would deepen US involvement in Syria, the Washington Post further wrote.
The agency's mission is a central but secret component of a broader US effort that also involves airstrikes and an influx of US military advisers into Iraq, it added.
The agency's training effort began early last year [2013] after US President Barack Obama issued a classified "finding" that authorized the CIA to start providing arms and instruction to insurgents seeking to oust the Syrian government, Washington Post said.
Initially, the program was run from secret camps in Jordan, but over the past year [2014], it has expanded to include at least one location in Qatar, according to US and Middle East officials.
Much of the instruction is carried out by US commandos working on loan from the Department of War, according to the Washington Post.
Militants have been drawn from militias in Syria as well as refugee camps. The intelligence services of Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other regional US allies have been involved in the training as well as assisting in background checks to help ensure that extremists with ties to al-Qaeda are excluded.
The agency has collected biometric data on militants who pass through the program, officials said, meaning DNA samples, iris scans or other identification markers.
The weapons distributed have been mostly light arms, although the so-called "Hazm Movement" was among a select group of units to be given US-made TOW antitank missiles, Washington Post said.
Overall, the CIA is operating on pace to train about 5,000 militants a year - roughly the same output that Pentagon officials have said they aim to achieve.
US War Secretary Chuck Hagel testified recently this week on Capitol Hill that preparations for the Pentagon training program are now "complete," and that "Saudi Arabia, Turkey and other partner nations have agreed to host training sites."
US war officials have outlined a goal of assembling a force of up to 15,000 whose main objective will not be fighting the Syrian government but gradually prying territory away from so-called "Deash" ["ISIL"].
US officials said their vetting efforts will focus on identifying recruits who are willing and motivated to fight "Daesh", but they acknowledge that enforcing that agenda may prove difficult once the militants leave CIA and US military camps.
"There's going to be fighting in Syria that we cannot necessarily predict," retired Marine Corps Gen. John R. Allen, the administration's coordinator for the Syria and Iraq coalition, said in an interview last month [October].
Furthermore, the agency's ability to scale up its operation over the past year [2014] has given officials confidence that US teams can recruit and screen larger numbers of militants without increasing their exposure to security risks including infiltration by al-Qaeda extremist group, the Washington Post wrote.Even so, it added, there is little indication that US-trained and armed so-called "moderates" have had any substantial impact on the direction of the conflict in Syria.
Rep. Adam B. Schiff, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said the ease with which those groups were overrun exposed problems that will be difficult to offset through remote training, even if it is ramped up.
Scenes of "the [so-called] "moderate" opposition either melting away, running away or joining league with [so-called] "al-Nusra" is a good indication of the difficulty that we're going to have," Schiff said.
The CIA meanwhile declined to comment on any aspect of its role in Syria.
Source: Washington Post, Edited by website team
