In comments that began with the dramatic understatement that the US is “not necessarily training large units” in their latest attempt to create Syrian rebel factions for the battle against ISIS, officials are conceding that they have trained less than 100 Syrians since the program was restarted back in March.
The program, which is operating out of Turkey, Jordan, and “other locations,” was scrapped last fall after the first batch of rebels got killed and the second batch immediately defected to al-Qaeda. Officials aren’t even presenting the new trainees as “fighters,” but rather as “leaders,” leaving open the question of what they’re supposed to lead.
One US official said he believed that while the Pentagon could train “10 people to use a rifle,” they’re instead training “a smaller number of people to accurately describe their own position,” and to “describe enemy positions.”
Absent from the comments are the reality of the situation, that the Pentagon training 10 people to use a rifle wouldn’t be a gamechanger in Syria anyhow, and that training some number less than 10 to describe where they’re at suggests they’re lowering the bar of achievement dramatically after last year’s failure.
And just how many millions of US taxpayer dollars has it taken to train less than 100 Syrians to tie their own shoe laces and find their posteriors with both hands?
Sorry, the ‘find their posteriors’ training is a part of the Advanced Training, and thus is waiting on someone to pull an extra $Billion out to finance it. You did pay your taxes last April, right? Well good, we’ll tell them the checks are in the mail.
Remember, this is from the Pentagon. We also know the CIA and the Pentagon are running two separate wars, to the point where the groups armed, trained and supplied by the CIA have been fighting the groups armed, trained and supplied by the Pentagon.
One of the signatures of an authoritarian government is that the power centers under the Great Leader fight for power underneath him/her. So, just remember, this is at best only half the picture as its only from one of these power centers.
Amazing, somehow we’ve only trained 100 guys ….. but every single bomb the Russkies drop on Al-Qaida manages to hit ‘our guys’ and thus gets John Kerry so very upset.
Maybe these rebels are being trained as rebel brain surgeons? The usual 4 years of college plus 4 years of medical school plus 7 years of residency has been revolutionized in this new multi-billion dollar training program. Unfortunately the rigorous nature of this program means that less than a 100 people were able to make it through this 4 month program which otherwise takes 15 intense years. Or maybe not?