US resumes training militants to fight Daesh in Syria

The United States military says it has once again begun training new groups of militants to fight Daesh terrorists in Syria.

"Dozens of people are now being trained," US Army Colonel Steve Warren, a Baghdad-based spokesman for the US-led coalition, said on Friday. "These are individuals as opposed to units."

The new training, which is part of a revamped program, will avoid mistakes that happened in the previous plan in Turkey last year.

The first group of militants are now learning how to identify targets to be struck by US-led coalition airstrikes from the air more effectively.

"That allows us to bring significantly more fires into play in any of these skirmishes, battles, and firefights that are taking place throughout Syria," Warren noted.

The Pentagon has not clarified where the militants are receiving training, but US officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Reuters it is in Turkey.

The Pentagon announced plans last year to conduct a $500 million “train-and-equip” program to produce about 5,400 militants in Syria annually as a proxy ground force against Daesh and President Bashar al-Assad, a program that yielded only a small cadre of 145 militants before it was officially pulled.

Separately, the CIA has also been running a similar program aimed at pressuring Assad to step down.

However, US officials and militants’ leaders have confirmed that CIA-armed militias are now shooting at Pentagon-armed ones in the war-torn country, showing a complete lack of control by the US over its war machine there.

MG