WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter told the Senate Armed Services Committee Tuesday that the United States has started training only 60 Syrian rebels to fight IS out of several thousand initially planned.
“The real question is can they [US military] be assured that the [Syrian] people they are sending in are not going to go over to the dark side,” Korb, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, said on Wednesday, recalling that "when the Saudis were helping the anti-Assad forces, a lot of them turned to go with ISIS [Islamic State]… so that’s what’s slowing it down.”
The fact the US military has only trained 60 fighters to date, Korb argued, seemed a bit low considering the vetting process has been going on for almost a year.
The US training program in Iraq was also problematic, he added, evidenced by Iraqi security forces unable to counter IS without assistance from external actors.
“If it wasn’t for the Iranian-trained Shia militias, Baghdad might have fallen by now,” Korb asserted.
US President Barack Obama, Korb noted, has the right overall strategy for countering IS in the region but he has couched the mission in the wrong terms by claiming the United States would “degrade and defeat” IS.
“What you’re going to have to do is contain them… and undermine their narrative because we [the US coalition] killed over 10,000 of them [IS], but they’ve recruited that many people from around the world, so that’s what you have to stop,” Korb concluded.
The United States has led a coalition of some 60 nations that has conducted more than 5,100 airstrikes against the Islamic State since August 2014.
The Islamic State is a Sunni jihadist group that has captured vast areas in Iraq and Syria. The group has been using social media to propagate its atrocities and recruit new members.
As many as 20,000 foreign fighters from across the globe have traveled to Syria and Iraq to join the Islamic State, according to US intelligence.
