American-backed rebels can’t seem to avoid being thwarted by Syria’s al-Qaeda branch. Eight of the 54 U.S. backed Syrian rebels who underwent training in Turkey to fight ISIS were reported on Thursday to have been captured by the Nusra Front — al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria.
Among the captured was the group’s leader, Nadim al-Hassan. The men were abducted in Azaz, a rural area north of Aleppo.
Syria’s civil war is in its fifth year now and the human toll has been substantial. The death toll passed 210,000 in February and to date just under 4 million Syrians are refugees and another almost 8 million are internally displaced — many more than once.
This is the third time in the last couple years that the Nusra Front has stifled U.S.-backed rebels. Last year, the Nusra Front knocked back the Syria Revolutionaries Front led by Jamal Maarouf and then earlier this year the Hazzm Movement collapsed after fighting Nusra in the northwest. The latest group, reportedly members of the “Division 30” militia, are the most significant because they were part of President Obama’s program to train Syrian rebels.
This program was set to train 5,400 rebels this year. To date though, only 54 have completed training as many have either been deemed illegible due to shady connections or have dropped out. American officials have struggled to find eligible fighters due to concerns over connections to groups like ISIS or Nusra. Many Syrians want to fight Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, while the U.S. is more concerned about the threat posed by ISIS.
Defense Secretary Ashton Carter has said the program is behind schedule.
“This number is much smaller than we hoped for at this point,” Carter told the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this month. “It’s going to take some time, obviously, to get the numbers up to the point where they can have an effect.”
Meanwhile, the U.S. and Turkey are planning to route ISIS, also called ISIL or the Islamic State, from the border region near Turkey. They’ve agreed that American warplanes from Turkish bases will support the effort but what they haven’t agreed on is which rebels to back.
One group of Islamists called Ahrar al-Sham has been on a media offensive as of late, publishing op-eds in the Washington Post and Britain’s conservative-leaning Telegraph, arguing that they regularly fight ISIS and deserve western support. Former U.S. Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford recently wrote an op-ed with Ali El Yassir arguing that the U.S. should at least talk to the rebel group.
Not all agree with this notion though. Juan Cole, a professor of history at University of Michigan, has called Ahrar al-Sham “Syria’s Taliban.”
In the meantime, Washington and Ankara have some thinking to do.
“We have to sit down with the Turks and figure it out,” an official in the Obama administration told Reuters, adding that there were groups “we absolutely will not work with.”