Criticizing Pentagon’s military program, which managed to train 54 Syrian recruits within eight months to fight ISIL, Captain Ammar al-Wawi, commander of Pentagon-trained moderate opposition in Syria  told “The Telegraph”: “At this rate, we will need 38 years to get to 15,000.” Captain Wawi of Division 30, which is the first group to graduate from a US-led training program, accused Pentagon of failing to protect them, forcing them to plea with the al-Nusra Front to release their fighters who were captured after a battle that killed 5.

This was the first defeat of the military training program, which is meant to be an anti-ISIL force. Fighters were killed or injured. Now they are accusing international coalition of betrayal because it failed to protect them. Capt Ammar al-Wawi stresses that the coalition was informed that al-Nusra was preparing an attack on their forces well in advance. 

 

The US-led military training program was crippled from the beginning as it faced a lot of criticism. Senator John McCain said that “there is a clear flaw in the moderate Syrian opposition training program.” This imbalance, according to the Free Syrian Army legal counselor Osama Abu Zayd, could be the American attempt to rectify the crisis through training the opposition, believing that Syrian trainees will abandon attacks on Assad's forces to only fight ISIL. But the recruits in this training disappointed the US.

 

This program was unsuccessful from the beginning because the US wasn't able to set its conditions that oblige its trainees to fight solely ISIL, while refraining from attacking Assad's forces, because the US does not want to displace the current Syrian regime with a military solution, they want to wage a proxy war against ISIL.

The first obstacles with the Pentagon-run program arose in the first months when the recruits threatened to withdraw from the training after they were requested to sign a pledge, which stated that they’d only fight ISIL, and not Assad's forces or other opposition groups. The US failed to observe that the double standards policy that it uses in dealing with the sensitive situations in the region, contribute to fueling sectarianism and encourage the repressive regimes to shed more blood and destroy residential areas with barrel bombs.

In this context, the leader of the Syrian opposition group Mustafa Sejari said to “The Middle East Briefing”: “If the US wants to help us, the Security Council should condemn the barrel bombs that are used by Assad’s forces, instead of telling us to avoid shooting the aircrafts that kill our people daily. Unlike the American program, we have choices to fight Assad, and we will fight him and ISIL regardless of the conditions stated by the US.”

 

All the insurgency and rejection from the opposition side, is something the US isn't used to. Meanwhile it is obvious that failure will be an inevitable result in this bet. One doesn't have to wait for new recruits to enter the battle to see the outcome. Which means that the $500 million training cost of 3000 to 5000 fighters annually will be thrown down the drain. Especially facing the weak demands of the Free Syrian Army and the lack of the required conditions of most of the recruits, given the American fears that some of these fighters will join the jihadi organizations which are spread all over Syria.

 

The expectations were mostly right – the trained factions started fighting ISIL, and ISIL supporters’ social media pages reported photos of the dead fighters, who supposedly were members of  the US and Turkish trained “Awakening”, who were killed in battles with militant organization. An ISIL supporter, published a video that shows the American-trained fighters’ incursion inside the Syrian territories through the Turkish border, and how they are monitored by ISIL fighters.

 

The next phase may be is the US — ISIL proxy conflict, where its heroes are the Free Syrian Army members that have recently graduated from the training camps in Turkey and Qatar. The US will bet on them because they are natives of the area and view their fight with ISIL as a fair issue, without forgetting that the intervention of international coalition has not been decided for several reasons, the most notable of which is that there are no alternative fighters on the ground now. This is unlike the situations of Iraq and Afghanistan invasions, as there weren't supportive groups to fight the “Taliban” and Iraqi regime. Furthermore, the US army is exhausted now after its withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq, so the American administration should give it a rest as well as time to recover and restore its morale and equipment.

 

The fact remains that the Syrian war is still fueled by the major powers negotiating with each other on the ideal alternative to the Syrian regime, while looking for the perfect plan for the elimination of ISIL.  After all these negotiations, the Syrian people are suffering the horrors of Assad's oppression, meanwhile his opponents are racist Austrian and Slovak authorities, which refused to receive people fleeing the massacres of the regime.