Private, Baladi News
A lot of news reports talk about a new project for training the Syrian "opposition" carried out by United States following its previous project which was considered one of the most unsuccessful American projects ever, which with a budget of more than 300 million dollars, could only train a limited number of “moderate” opposition factions who had insignificant role in fighting the regime and solving the Syrian tragedy.
It’s unclear whether these millions were spent for the sake of training the opposition or this project has become a pretext and cover to fund the U.S. activities in the northern part of Syria, especially the great support the Kurds are taking from them. We still don’t know whether this support is included in the project of training the opposition or not, especially that the Kurds are always referred to by the U.S. as independent forces who have their own project and not opposition forces.
The new project announced by the U.S to train what it calls "the Syrian opposition" is different from the previous one, being quality-oriented, so instead of training those who fight ISIS on ground, the U.S. is going to train only “Liaison” members which means that only selected members of the moderate factions are going to be trained to coordinate between the coalition air forces and the fighters on ground. Their work is limited to marking air strikes targets and fire support in addition to coordinating with coalition forces. Based on the projects' criteria, their number won't exceed 200 members.
The idea of this project could be considered a follow-up on the cooperation between the Americans and Kurds and maybe a cloning of the trainings they received. We can say for sure that many of them have got similar trainings due to the ongoing coordination between them and the coalition air forces , especially the American with high level that are shown in many filmed reports.
If Kurds can handle the mission that was assigned to the “moderate” opposition, then it’s impossible to believe that the Kurds have never got any training; Pointing targets and communicating with aircrafts along with operation rooms need extremely complicated equipment that require high training and this cannot happen without the Americans and the approval and support of the coalition countries. In fact, Kurds have never worked with aircrafts throughout their history and the types of aircrafts used in the operations in Syria are versatile and need a high technical and military level to deal with them.
The most dangerous thing in this project is that it shows that America is no longer thinking of establishing any new military force and has actually abandoned the “moderate” factions in Syria. It has also stopped the arming program and may start disarming them. U.S. now is trying to depend on the existing forces on ground, in particular the Kurdish militias which have gained the American’s trust. America has no intention to support any Arab force in Syria and this is an indication of repeating the Iraqi scenario in which the Arab Sunni were intentionally weakened after the American occupation and where all the Kurdish and Shiite militias turned into fait accompli force, as the current Iraqi army were formed.
Especially that most of the Arab factions in Syria are classified as terrorist factions and could be bombed by the coalition at any moment, also the factions receiving the western military support may get less amount of this support or even stop getting any support as a result of such program which will pave the way for the Syrian regime militias who are mostly Shiite and for the Kurdish militias as well to control the scene gradually.
Compared to the “Moderate” opposition training project which has failed, United States has not issued any description of the case and level of the success of its projects in training the Kurds, who have actually converted to a force associated substantially with the US support and the US programs, so it cannot be said that the presence of 300 "counselor and trainer" in the Kurdish-held areas does not include any clues of a training and cooperation project.
Accordingly, what are the reasons behind the failure of the project of training the "moderated" opposition, and why that did not happen with the Kurds, knowing that a huge number of the armed opposition members were formed by military people, including high ranked army officers, some of which were previously enrolled in advanced academic courses. On the other hand, the Kurdish militias do not have any real military ranks and no one knows if their members received any academic military trainings throughout their history or not.