Imagine if you will, the Three Stooges, armed with machine guns, spraying bullets into a packed theater because they saw a bad guy in the crowd.

That's America's foreign policy in Syria.

We've accomplished nothing but getting hundreds of thousands of people killed, while undermining our own standing in the region.

We've been messing with Syria since the CIA helped launch a coup d'etat in 1949. This includes a special forces raid in 2008, and CIA funding the opposition since 2006, and trained rebels since 2012, but I'm going to focus in our record since we began bombing Syria in 2014.



US has trained only 'four or five' Syrian fighters against Isis, top general testifies (Guardian, 2015)



A $500m effort to train Syrian forces against the Islamic State has resulted in only a handful of fighters actively battling the jihadi army, the top military commander overseeing the war has testified.

“We’re talking four or five,” General Lloyd Austin, commander of US Central Command, told a dissatisfied Senate armed services committee on Wednesday.

The training initiative is Barack Obama’s linchpin for retaking Syrian territory from Isis. The Pentagon anticipated in late 2014 that it would have trained 5,000 anti-Isis Syrian rebels by now.

“The program is much smaller than we hoped,” conceded the Pentagon’s policy chief, Christine Wormuth, saying there were between 100 and 120 fighters currently being trained. Wormuth said they were “getting terrific training”.

The Pentagon Wasted $500 Million Training Syrian Rebels. It’s About to Try Again. (Foreign Policy, 2016)



Military officials will probably remain cautious about the program, given last year’s embarrassing attempt to build a Syrian force. It took months of vetting by U.S. officials to decide who to let into the program, raising howls of protest on Capitol Hill over the slow pace of building the force as ISIS gained ground throughout northern Syria. And things went only downhill from there. In July, the first group of about 50 trainees to cross back into Syria were ambushed by the al Qaeda affiliate Nusra Front. The fighters mostly scattered and the U.S. military was unable to account for their whereabouts, or their equipment.

Then in September, roughly 70 other trainees were forced to surrender most of their U.S.-supplied trucks and ammunition to Nusra once again, in return for safe passage through the group’s territory in northern Syria. By December, U.S. officials said there were fewer than 100 of the trained rebels still active inside Syria.

In Syria, militias armed by the Pentagon fight those armed by the CIA (LA Times, 2016)



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.



U.S. Military Battles Syrian Rebels Once Supported by CIA, Now Backed by Turkey (Newsweek, 2017)



C.I.A. Arms for Syrian Rebels Supplied Black Market, Officials Say (NY Times, 2016)



Weapons shipped into Jordan by the Central Intelligence Agency and Saudi Arabia intended for Syrian rebels have been systematically stolen by Jordanian intelligence operatives and sold to arms merchants on the black market, according to American and Jordanian officials.

Some of the stolen weapons were used in a shooting in November that killed two Americans and three others at a police training facility in Amman, F.B.I. officials believe after months of investigating the attack, according to people familiar with the investigation.

Blowback: ISIS Got A Powerful Missile The CIA Secretly Bought In Bulgaria (Buzzfeed, 2017)



A guided anti-tank missile ended up in the hands of ISIS terrorists less than two months after the US government purchased it in late 2015 — highlighting weaknesses in the oversight and regulation of America’s covert arms programs, according to information published Thursday by an arms monitoring group called Conflict Armament Research (CAR).

Though the report says the missile was purchased by the US Army using a contractor, BuzzFeed News has learned that the real customer appears to have been the CIA. It was part of the spy agency’s top secret operation to arm rebels in Syria to fight the forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The missile ended up in the hands of ISIS fighters in Iraq, according to the report.

US Dismisses UN Plea: Won’t Stop Bombing Civilians in Raqqa (Antiwar, 2017)



U.S. Strike on Syria Mosque Complex Was Legal, Defense Dept. Says (NY Times, 2017)



Dozens of Civilians Killed When U.S. Bombed a School And a Market in Syria (Intercept, 2017)

Russia accuses US-led coalition of 'barbaric' bombing of Syria's Raqqa (CNBC, 2017)

As criminally incompetent these articles prove our policies to be, none of them can match today's news.

Tillerson Says U.S. Troops Are Staying in Syria, but No One Is Sure What They Will Do There (Slate, 2018)



Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said in a speech at Stanford University on Wednesday that U.S. troops in Syria—thought to currently number around 2,000—would be remaining there indefinitely, even after all of ISIS’s territory has been retaken. What exactly those troops will be doing is unclear—other than finding themselves in the middle of a new and unpredictable phase of the Syrian conflict, where it’s getting harder to figure out just what side the United States is on, or what the sides even are.



Turkey Begins Operation Against U.S.-Backed Kurdish Militias in Syria (NT Times, 2018)



Turkish artillery fired shells into the northern Syrian region of Afrin on Friday as Turkey’s defense minister announced a military operation against American-backed Kurdish militias, despite warnings from the United States. The developments threatened to further destabilize a region fractured by seven years of war.

Now for an example of alternate reality: U.S. assessment on Russia in Syria: A 'strategic blunder' (CNN, 2015)

Because it's Russia that has made a strategic blunder in Syria, amirite?