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Few U.S.-Trained Syrians Still Fight ISIS, Senators Are Told
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of New York Times


New York Times, September 16, 2015
Posted: September 27th, 2015
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/17/world/middleeast/isis-isil...

Only four or five Syrian individuals trained by the United States military to confront the Islamic State remain in the fight, the head of the United States Central Command told a Senate panel on Wednesday, a bleak acknowledgment that the Defense Departments $500 million program to raise an army of Syrian fighters has gone nowhere. Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, the top American commander in the Middle East, also told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the United States would not reach its goal of training 5,000 Syrian fighters anytime soon. In May, the Defense Department began its training program for up to 5,400 fighters a year, in what White House officials described as a necessary component of President Obamas strategy to use local troops on the ground against the Islamic State. General Austin told the Senate committee that many fighters in the first class of 54 graduates of the training program for Syrians were attacked in July by an offshoot of Al Qaeda, the Nusra Front, and either fled or were killed, leaving only a small number of rebels still in the fight. Asked how many fighters were still in Syria, General Austin said that its a small number. He added, Were talking four or five.

Note: Read a carefully researched report on the covert origins of ISIS. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing war news articles from reliable major media sources.


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