MidEast

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Rebel Group Could Quit Anti-ISIS Coalition Over U.S. Restrictions Against Targeting Assad

by TheTower.org Staff |

An anti-Assad rebel group in Syria may quit the American-led coalition fighting the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) over American demands that it not target the forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Michael Weiss reported Sunday for The Daily Beast.

A centerpiece of the U.S. war plan against ISIS is in danger of collapsing. A key rebel commander and his men are ready to ready to pull out in frustration of the U.S. program to train a rebel army to beat back the terror group in Syria, The Daily Beast has learned….

Mustapha Sejari, one of the rebels already approved for the U.S. training program, told The Daily Beast that he and his 1,000 men are on the verge of withdrawing from the program. The issue: the American government’s demand that the rebels can’t use any of their newfound battlefield prowess or U.S.-provided weaponry against the army of Bashar al-Assad or any of its manifold proxies and allies, which include Iranian-built militias such as Lebanese Hezbollah. They must only fight ISIS, Washington insists.

“We submitted the names of 1,000 fighters for the program, but then we got this request to promise not to use any of our training against Assad,” Sejari, a founding member of the Revolutionary Command Council, said. “It was a Department of Defense liaison officer who relayed this condition to us orally, saying we’d have to sign a form. He told us, ‘We got this money from Congress for a program to fight ISIS only.’ This reason was not convincing for me. So we said no.”

ISIS is currently advancing on Aleppo, Syria’s second-largest city.

In January, The New York Times reported that the administration assured Assad “through Iraqi intermediaries, that Syria’s military is not their target,” and that American policy had changed to “train[ing] and equip[ping] Syrian insurgents, but now mainly to fight the Islamic State, not the government.” A few weeks later, Assad told a BBC interviewer that the United States-led coalition kept him informed about air strikes against ISIS in Syrian territory.

Last month, an editorial in The Washington Post called on the administration to do more to aid the moderate anti-Assad rebels, warning that failure to do so would “increase the chance that as the Assad regime loses ground, that held by terrorists will expand.”

[Photo: WORLD NEWS / YouTube ]

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