In Syria, militias armed by the Pentagon fight those armed by the CIA

Syrian militias armed by different parts of the U.S. war machine have begun to fight each other on the plains between the besieged city of Aleppo and the Turkish border, highlighting how little control U.S. intelligence officers and military planners have over the groups they have financed and trained in the bitter five-year-old civil war.
The fighting has intensified over the last two months, as CIA-armed units and Pentagon-armed ones have repeatedly shot at each other while maneuvering through contested territory on the northern outskirts of Aleppo, U.S. officials and rebel leaders have confirmed.
In mid-February, a CIA-armed militia called Fursan al Haq, or Knights of Righteousness, was run out of the town of Marea, about 20 miles north of Aleppo, by Pentagon-backed Syrian Democratic Forces moving in from Kurdish-controlled areas to the east.

The attacks by one U.S.-backed group against another come amid continued heavy fighting in Syria and illustrate the difficulty facing U.S. efforts to coordinate among dozens of armed groups that are trying to overthrow the government of President Bashar Assad, fight the Islamic State militant group and battle one another all at the same time.

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RetiredUSN said:

BS title. The Pentagon gets it's marching orders from civilians.

The title should read Obama/Carter/Kerry arms militias.

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President Obama this month authorized a new Pentagon plan to train and arm Syrian rebel fighters, relaunching a program that was suspended in the fall after a string of embarrassing setbacks which included recruits being ambushed and handing over much of their U.S.-issued ammunition and trucks to an Al Qaeda affiliate.

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At first, the two different sets of fighters were primarily operating in widely separated areas of Syria — the Pentagon-backed Syrian Democratic Forces in the northeastern part of the country and the CIA-backed groups farther west. But over the last several months, Russian airstrikes against anti-Assad fighters in northwestern Syria have weakened them. That created an opening which allowed the Kurdish-led groups to expand their zone of control to the outskirts of Aleppo, bringing them into more frequent conflict with the CIA-backed outfits.

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TheDemSocialist said:

Oh the selective outrage.

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TheDemSocialist said:

Oh the selective outrage.

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Fletch said:

With whom should the 'outrage' posed in your OP be directed at then if not the current administration? Is Bush to blame for this somehow?

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RetiredUSN said:

Outrage? I could could give a rats ass, other than seeing right through the hypocrisy of the Democrat administration, and it's support for another war by proxy, and using a group of fighters that we have no influence over.

It's no wonder that nobody in the Middle East can trust the USA

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TheDemSocialist said:

The current situation the middle east is facing is bigger than just one administration. I think it goes all the way back to Reagan.

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