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Failed US Foreign Fighter Training Could Out-Scandalize the Panama Papers

© REUTERS / Thaier Al-SudaniUS-led coalition instructors monitor as they train Iraqi soldiers from the army's 72nd infantry brigade while participating in a joint live ammunition exercise at Besmaya military base in south of Baghdad, Iraq, January 27, 2016.
US-led coalition instructors monitor as they train Iraqi soldiers from the army's 72nd infantry brigade while participating in a joint live ammunition exercise at Besmaya military base in south of Baghdad, Iraq, January 27, 2016. - Sputnik International
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Over recent years Washington has started a large number of training programs for the opposition forces in Syria, Afghanistan and other hot spots, spending considerable amounts of taxpayers’ money without ever achieving their stated objectives. The investigation into these failures could produce a larger bang than the so-called Panama Papers.

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“The US has invested more than a decade and nearly $70 billion in taxpayer funds to develop the Afghan security forces, officially known as the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF),” says an article on the website of the US-based Breitbart News Network.

However, it notes, an ever increasing number of ANSF operatives trained by US instructors is defecting to the Taliban to share their newly acquired knowledge to earn the living.

In Iraq, the US spent $25 billion training and equipping a large Iraqi force, which then threw down its weapons and abandoned two key cities, Mosul and Ramadi, to Daesh militants, according to an earlier report by Reuters.

Between 800 and 1,000 Islamic State fighters defeated 30,000 Iraqi troops.

USA Today has also released inconvenient information noting that the Pentagon spent 384 million dollars out of initially planned $500 million program on the preparation of 150 fighters, instead of the almost 3,000 militants it originally planned to train.

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At that point, US officials declared this program a bitter failure and shut it down, without ever mentioning that the Pentagon spent 2 million dollars per fighter trained.

The Hill website however reported in March that Army Gen. Lloyd Austin requested permission from the administration to restart the halted program.

Pentagon had also spent over 42 million dollars for just two months on training of the so-called “moderate opposition fighters” in Syria. Half of all the fighters prepared by the US were immediately captured by Jabhat al-Nusra, New Eastern Outlook quotes CBS as reporting last August.

The website acknowledges other failures of the US military to achieve the stated objectives of its equip-and-train programs in hot spots all over the world.

“Therefore, it won’t be an exaggeration to state that those programs have become a gold mine for certain corrupted officers of the US armed and intelligence forces,” the website states.

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Should those facts be brought to the public’s attention, it notes, they would produce a considerably larger bang than the so-called Panama Papers.

Numerous journalist investigations, such as the ones that were carried out by The Guardian and Bloomberg, the website says, serve as a testimony to the fact that the US has unfortunately become the most corrupt state in the world, where money is being stolen from taxpayers daily, it therefore concludes.

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