Syrian rebels on Thursday said a US decision to halt a covert CIA program of military aid would mark a big blow to the Syrian opposition and risked allowing extremists to tighten their grip over the insurgency.
Rebels who have received aid under the CIA program said they had yet to be informed of the US decision first reported by the Washington Post on Wednesday and confirmed by two US officials.
A Free Syrian Army (FSA) commander said that the US decision risked triggering the collapse of the moderate opposition, which would benefit Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and extremists linked to al-Qaeda who have long sought to extinguish more moderate groups.
Other rebel sources said much would depend on whether US-allied regional states Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey kept up their support to groups fighting under the FSA banner, which had been the focus of the CIA program.
“We heard nothing about this,” said an opposition official familiar with the program, describing the decision as a complete surprise.
The US decision compounds an already bleak outlook for the Syrian opposition that has been battling since 2011 to unseat al-Assad, who appears militarily unassailable thanks in large part to staunch Russian and Iranian backing.
The CIA program which began in 2013 funneled weapons, training and cash to vetted FSA groups via Jordan and Turkey.
It regulated aid to the rebels after a period of unchecked support early in the war — especially from Gulf states — helped give rise to an array of insurgent groups, many of them extremists.
The support in some cases included anti-tank missiles that helped the rebels make big advances against the depleted Syrian army, triggering Russia’s intervention in September 2015.
FSA rebels have long complained the support fell well short of what they needed to make a decisive difference in the war against the better-armed Syrian army and the Iran-backed militias helping it, including Lebanon’s Hezbollah.
One of the US officials said the decision was part of a Trump administration effort to improve relations with Russia.
Critics of the CIA program, including some US officials, have also said some of the armed and trained rebels defected to the Islamic State and other radical groups.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to comment when asked what he thought about the US move and said only that US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin did not discuss the issue when they met at a G20 summit earlier this month.
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