A frame grab taken from footage released by Russia’s defence ministry yesterday shows a Russian Su-34 fighter-bomber dropping a bomb in the air over Syria.

AFP
Washington


Washington was forced yesterday to admit the failure of its plan to create Syrian rebel units to fight Islamic State, vowing instead to arm select local leaders.
White House and Pentagon officials insisted the “pause” in efforts to train Syrian fighters outside the country would allow them to re-focus their efforts elsewhere.
“We’ve had some significant challenges,” said Christine Wormuth, undersecretary of defence for policy.  
“So we’re going to pause the training we’ve been doing where we’ve recruited specific individual fighters.”
But, as President Barack Obama’s Syria strategy stumbles from one setback to the next, the suspension of the $500mn train and equip effort was an embarrassment.
Obama’s Republican foes, like Texas Congressman Mac Thornberry, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, were quick to twist the knife.
“The administration has had a weak, inadequate policy in Syria and a weak, inadequate policy against ISIS,” he said as the news broke.
“Adjusting one programme, even if it were successful, will not solve the problem.”  
“Today, the Obama administration acknowledged what we have known for some time: the training of Syrian rebels is a failure,” declared Senator Deb Fischer.
Pentagon officials told reporters that instead of training rebel units, the US military would dole out weapons to favored commanders already on the ground.
The White House and Defence Secretary Ash Carter scrambled to portray this as a way to re-focus the strategy to increase pressure on Islamic State.  
“The model before was we were training infantry-type units,” a senior US defence official said.
“We are now changing to a model that will produce more military combat capability.”  
The official declined to say how many leaders would be armed and trained, but noted the new effort would get under way “within days”.
Two small groups of US-trained fighters have crossed into Syria from training centres in Turkey or Jordan this year, but they did not last long.
The first broke up after coming under attack from the Al Nusra Front, an Al Qaeda franchise.  
The other surrendered much of its equipment, perhaps a quarter of its trucks and guns, to Al Nusra.
Last month Centcom commander General Lloyd Austin admitted that after the debacle only “four or five” Pentagon-trained rebels remain active in Syria.
This attracted derision from US lawmakers, who said the programme should be scrapped altogether. Republican Senator Kelly Ayotte said the number was a “joke”.
But the Pentagon insisted the train and equip programme was only one plank of the overall effort, and noted that it has long been arming groups already inside Syria.
Carter cited the success of US-backed Kurdish militias in breaking the Islamic State’s siege of the border town of Kobane as a model for future operations.
“We have devised a number of different approaches,” he said at a news conference in London.