Although the Pentagon’s train and equip mission in Syria is threatened by woefully low recruitment numbers, the problem isn’t the strategy, according to one US general—it’s just bad timing.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey claimed that the month of Ramadan is one of the headwinds facing the US military’s efforts to assist moderate Syrian rebels in their fights against Bashar Al-Assad and the Islamic State.
“Sometimes there are seasonal factors that contribute to the willingness of young men in the Middle East to stay where they are with a particular program,” Dempsey said during a briefing with reporters on Wednesday. “There’s a lot of folks that are interested in being with their families during that period. We may see after Ramadan that some of the ones we lost may come back,” he added.
The Islamic holy month of Ramadan began in early June. The Pentagon’s train and equip mission, however, was formally initiated more than six months ago, in January, with the deployment of 400 US troops to training centers in Qatar, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia.
A goal of training 5,000 troops a year has already been revised down for this year, with officials hoping they can have 3,000 rebels trained by the start of 2016.
Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, who was also at the briefing, expanded on broader obstacles facing US military leaders.
“There are two reasons why it’s difficult to get large numbers trained,” Carter said. First, is the “principled requirement” to conduct vetting. “Only a fraction of those who step forward willing to take this mission on pass through vetting,” the Defense Secretary remarked. The second requirement is that they are willing to initially fight ISIL. “That is the principled purpose of their being trained and equipped,” Carter said.
“Those are the two factors that make the number of those who get through the gates and into our training centers—which do exist and could accept more, and we want to accept more, and I except in time will be accepting more—that’s why the current numbers are small,” Carter added.
The Pentagon is having similar difficulties training Iraqi fighters to take on ISIL. During a hearing last month, Secretary Carter admitted that only 7,000 fighters had been trained, despite the administration’s goal of having a force size of 24,000 by fall.
That revelation prompted Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas) to ask if the administration’s counter-ISIL strategy was a “serious proposal.”
