The US has axed its $500m (£326m) programme to train and equip moderate Syrian rebels to fight Islamic State in another move highlighting western failures as Russia seizes the initiative by launching direct military intervention in support of Bashar al-Assad.

Pentagon officials were expected to officially announce the end of the programme on Friday as the US defence secretary, Ashton Carter, left London after meetings with his British counterpart, Michael Fallon, about the conflicts in Syria and Iraq, the New York Times reported.



The programme was the most visible element of US backing for Syrian opposition groups but it has already suffered embarrassing setbacks. Last month, it transpired that it had trained only four or five fighters inside Syria and that others had surrendered to rival groups and handed over the their weapons when they crossed the border from Turkey. Other covert programmes are run by the CIA.

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A senior US Department of Defense official said there would no longer be any more recruiting of moderate Syrian rebels to go through training programmes in Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates. Instead, a much smaller training centre would be set up in Turkey, where a small group of “enablers” – mostly leaders of opposition groups – would be taught operational methods such as how to call in airstrikes, the paper reported.



Gen Lloyd Austin, who heads the US military’s Central Command (Centcom), confirmed last month that 54 graduates of the programme were attacked by the al-Qaida affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra, in northern Syria in July. It is still not clear how many of the fighters fled and were captured, or killed.

Austin told Congress there was no way of meeting the goal of 5,000 recruits a year, but urged patience. Another defence official blamed the reason for low numbers on the laborious vetting process used to recruit rebels.

The scrapping of the programme caps a disastrous few weeks for US policy on Syria, already weakened by the perception that while Obama is prepared to tackle Isis, he will not fight the Assad regime head on but is instead holding out for a political solution to end the conflict.

Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey are planning to step up arms supplies to Syrian rebel groups that are being targeted by Russian airstrikes, diplomats have told the Guardian. Those countries, as well as Syrians fighting Assad, argue overwhelmingly that the regime poses a far greater threat to the country than the jihadi group, which many see as a western fixation.

The US, like Britain, has been signalling in recent weeks that Assad could remain in power in Damascus for an undefined transitional period, fuelling opposition fears that they are being abandoned.

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Obama said last week that Russia’s failure to distinguish between Isis fighters and moderate opposition forces was a “recipe for disaster”. The US president said his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, “doesn’t distinguish between Isil [Isis] and a moderate Sunni opposition that wants to see Mr Assad go. From their perspective, they’re all terrorists. And that’s a recipe for disaster.”

Fallon said after his talks with Carter that the UK government remained committed to building parliamentary support for RAF airstrikes against Isis in Syria despite Russia’s intervention.

“We will continue to build the case for military action in north-east Syria where Isil is headquartered, where its command and control is. Russian intervention doesn’t change that. We will continue to build the case for intervention in the new parliament,” he said.

Carter said Russia’s support for Assad was “illogical” and would ultimately rebound against Moscow. “They are going to have the effect of inflaming the very extremism that Russia claims to want to combat,” he said. “By taking the side of Assad they inflame the civil war – and therefore extremism – and prolong the suffering of the Syrian people. They are going to have the effect also of turning everyone against Russia itself. This will boomerang in a very direct way on Russia.”

