Local Editor

The US is training "dozens" of militants to battle Daesh [the Arabic acronym for the terrorist "ISIS" group] in Syria, in the hope of fixing mistakes that swamped the Pentagon's previous multimillion dollar effort, when most of the equipment and recruits were lost or ended up on the side of terrorists.

"Dozens of people are now being trained," US Army Colonel Steve Warren, a Baghdad-based spokesman for the US-led coalition, confirmed to reporters. "It's still relatively small as we see if this works," he said, while refusing to comment on the scale of the program.

Warren provided neither a definite figure for the number of individuals in training nor their location. Citing an unnamed source, Reuters reported that it had been taking place in Turkey, just as with America's previous attempt to bolster the so-called moderate Syrian opposition.

"A training and equipping program that we are now doing that is based on the lessons that we learned from our ill-fated train and equip program of 2015," Warren said.

The US previously failed in its attempt to train and equip militants, having to stop the program following a scandal, when it was revealed that one group of trainees had surrendered one quarter of its US-supplied weapons, ammunition, and vehicles to the al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra Front in exchange for safe passage.

Originally, the Pentagon's program was intended to graduate 3,000 well prepared New Syrian Forces fighters in 2015, and 5,000 annually afterwards, allegedly to combat Daesh.

Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team