White House ends Syrian rebel training program

(Image credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

published 9 October 2015

The U.S. will no longer be training Syrian rebels, Obama administration officials said Friday. After the $500 million Pentagon program failed to produce ground combat forces that could effectively take on the Islamic State in Syria, The New York Times reports that the White House decided to pull the plug.

The program had initially promised to produce 5,000 capable fighters by the end of the year, a goal that officials admitted at the end of last month was "unattainable," Foreign Policy reports. The U.S. had suspended the recruitment of new fighters last month after the first two groups that were trained had "either been killed, handed over some of their equipment to the al Qaeda-backed al Nusra Front, or simply melted away," Foreign Policy says.