The US defense secretary Ash Carter has painted a bleak picture of the country’s efforts to train fighters in Iraq and Syria, revealing the military has trained fewer than a third of the Iraqi troops it expected would lead the fight against the Islamic State.

He described the Iraqi-led ground campaign as “a work in progress” and conceded there were also serious difficulties in identifying fighters who could be trusted to fight Isis in Syria.

“We simply haven’t received enough troops,” Carter said on Tuesday, stating the US has only trained around 7,000 Iraqi security forces, at four specialist sites it had anticipated would be used to train 24,000 soldiers by the fall.

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Training Iraqi fighters for the foundering ground campaign to seize back territory controlled by Isis is a central pillar of the Pentagon’s strategy.

Military chiefs have repeatedly said they believe local forces on the ground, combined with US-led air strikes in Iraq and Syria, can degrade and ultimately defeat the militant group.

Carter told told a House armed services committee hearing that Isis could still be defeated, despite the series of military setbacks experienced by the Iraqi army.

He acknowledged a failure to recruit local security forces, particularly Sunnis who have so far proved reluctant to join the fight, and said pressure was being placed on the Iraq government to ramp up effort to recruit paid fighters.

Last week President Barack Obama approved sending 450 extra troops to bolster the Iraqi army in Anbar province.

As with other deployments, the White House insists these are non-combat personnel. The US has been incrementally increasing its presence in Iraq with troops it describes as advisers and facilitators in the year since Isis took control of large sections of the country.

More than four years after the US officially pulled its troops out of Iraq, the total number of its military personnel deployed in the country now stands at 3,550.

Despite that, the Iraqi government has seemed unable to rein in the insurgents; last month Isis took Ramadi, in Anbar province and the Iraqi army has failed to retake Mosul, lost to Isis last year.

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Republican hawks in Washington are pushing for a deployment of thousands of ground forces in Iraq, arguing the country’s army is incapable of defeating the militants. Others on Capitol Hill are asking whether the US should redirect support currently going to the Iraqi government directly to Kurdish forces, which are showing more promise.

Carter said that both the US and other allies were equipping the Kurds, “who really know how to fight”, and insisted there were some signs of progress in the effort to recruit Sunni troops for the Iraqi army.



While efforts to train Iraqis had been “slowed by a lack of trainees”, Carter said, last week’s deployment of a further 450, to be based at Taqaddum, in Anbar province, would accelerate the training of Sunni fighters, he said.



Carter added that efforts to train and arm rebel groups in Syria were proving considerably more complicated than in Iraq. The defense secretary said it was proving difficult to identify the rebels in Syria that had the “right mindset and ideology” and the capacity to fight the militants.

“When we equip them and set them loose, what responsibility do we have to them thereafter?” he asked. “I think we have some obligation to support them and protect them, including supply them.”

That raised the risk, he added, of US military equipment being “diverted” to fighters and other extremists in Syria. “We have enough training sites,” he said of the operation to train Syrian-based fighters, “for now we don’t have enough trainees.”

The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Martin Dempsey, who also appeared at the hearing, echoed concerns about the difficulty in recruiting and retaining suitable fighters in Syria as well as Iraq.

He said there would be a decision “within the next couple of months” about suitable rebel fighters the Pentagon could support in Syria with command and control assistance. “We have had some challenges recruiting and retaining. We’re trying to work through those,” he said.

Asked if it was worth continuing with the policy of training and equipping Syrian rebels, given the inability so far to identify suitable partners, Dempsey replied: “We’re just literally at the first iteration or trance of this, so it is a little too soon to give up on it.”