US Can’t Protect CIA Backed Rebels from Russia


The Obama military isn’t willing to intervene on behalf of the rebels, the ones that we trained and gave weapons to. Given the potentially disastrous consequences Obama’s leadership embroiled in an escalation with Russian forces, U.S. defense officials and top lawmakers are being cowards. No one wants to accidentally touch off a showdown when America has no leadership.

Obama’s cheerleaders, the Daily Beast, reports:

“We are not going to shoot Russian airplanes. We are not going to hit their airfields [in Syria]. And we are not going to equip [rebels] with MANPADs,” one U.S. defense official told The Daily Beast, using the acronym for shoulder-fired, surface-to-air missiles. Previous programs to hand out those weapons have sometimes gone disastrously wrong.

The rebels attacked by Russian forces on Wednesday and Thursday were in western Syria, alongside al Qaeda affiliates and far from any ISIS positions. That suggests the rebels were not there to fight the self-proclaimed Islamic State, as the Obama administration called the top priority. Instead, they were battling the Assad regime as part of a still-active CIA program for rebels which has run in tandem with the disastrous and now-defunct train and equip Pentagon program.

Source: Daily Beast

As strange as it sounds, the U.S. actually has two separate proxies in Syria. While American spies cooperate with their regional counterparts to covertly provide training, weapons, and ammunition to vetted factions of Free Syrian Army still battling the Syrian Army or pro-Assad militias, the Department of Defense has attempted to train up a counterterrorism strike force to hunt and kill ISIS, known as the New Syrian Forces. The two don’t necessarily work at cross-purposes; in fact, they’re meant to complement each other.

The Obama administration has emphasized that its main fight is against ISIS, but since 2011 it has been calling for Assad’s negotiated “transition” from power. The administration realizes that it’s in a much stronger position to facilitate that transition if it underwrites the application of mild to moderate military pressure on Damascus—not enough to topple the regime but enough to keep it on the defensive. Russia, unsurprisingly, has decided to rob the U.S. of that leverage by attacking the anti-regime rebels. And Putin has calculated, with good reason, that the U.S. will do little to nothing to defend these proxies from Russian bombs.

Par for the course…



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