US alters Islamic State Syria strategy, will equip established groups

WASHINGTON: The United States will halt its programme to train individual Syrian fighters to combat Islamic State, and will instead focus on arming established groups with records of success, senior Obama administration officials said Friday.
Acknowledging that the Pentagon's 2014 US$500 million (RM2.07 billion) train-and-equip programme, which involved training individual recruits and returning them to the battlefield, faced "significant challenges," the US strategy will now concentrate on bolstering forces already fighting the Islamic State.
The change "represents an ongoing process where we aim to learn from what works in our strategy and aim to make corrections where we see things that are not working," the White House said.
The move also follows Russia's stepped up engagement in Syria.
Moscow says its goal is to attack Islamic State positions, but its focus appears also to be aiding Russian ally President Bashar al-Assad in his fight against rebels and securing the western coastal area where it has a naval base.
The new US strategy, according to officials, is to "build on what has worked" so far in combating the Islamic State terrorist militia and getting more equipment "directly into the hands of people who are in the fight."
These groups will also be backed up with US air power.
While not naming specific groups targeted for support, officials pointed to the success of the Kurdish Peshmerga along the Turkish border in Kobane, Syria, while noting that others are made up of Arabs and Christians.
Noting that the number of groups fighting on the ground was an "incredibly complex quilt," the White House officials cautioned that "this is the most complex ... most dynamic situation imaginable."
US Defence Secretary Ash Carter directed the Pentagon to provide weaponry to "a select group of vetted leaders and their units" to eventually make a "concerted push" into Islamic State territory, according to a statement from Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook.
"I remain convinced that a lasting defeat of Isil in Syria will depend in part on the success of local, motivated, and capable ground forces," Carter said in the statement, using an alternative name for the group. — dpa