Last week, General Lloyd Austin of U.S. Central Command told Congress that a $500 million effort to arm and train moderate Syrian rebels had yielded a vastly underwhelming number of success cases: "four or five," to be exact.
Congressman Stephen Lynch—who voted in favor of the measure—joined Boston Public Radio Tuesday to voice his assessment of how the program turned out.
"We vetted probably over 5,000 individuals totally and I went over there for this purpose," Lynch said. "After all that vetting, because we did not want Islamist extremists, because we wanted people focused on fighting ISIL, we ended up with 54 Syrian fighters. 54. That was it. You're right, it's pathetic. That tells you that effort was going to be a failure."
Lynch said that, among the numerous groups seeking to wrest control of Syria from President Bashar al-Assad, the most powerful are extreme: the group which calls itself the Islamic State, Al-Qaeda, and Hezbollah, as well as others. If the United States is seeking to beef up a strong, moderate force to turn power over to, they have a very long way to go.
"If we're going to get them to the top of the heap, we've got to take out all those other groups before we can put somebody in power we can hand over to," Lynch said.
"That's a 20 year project if you're trying to do that," he continued. "We better have a whole lot of international support. That's why I'm not in favor of putting our people on the ground there."
To hear more from Congressman Stephen Lynch, tune in to Boston Public Radio above.
