Pentagon selects first 400 Syrians to be trained to fight Islamic State

WASHINGTON — U.S. military and intelligence agencies are doing background checks on the first 400 Syrians to be trained to combat Islamic State forces in their country, with a target date set as early as September for them to join the war, the Pentagon said Friday.

About 1,800 other Syrians have been identified as candidates for the program, with background probes slated to start soon.

It was the first official word that the U.S.-led effort to equip and train thousands of Syrians to fight the Islamic State has begun, four months after Congress approved spending $500 million on the program. More than 350 U.S. troops have arrived in Turkey and other nearby countries in preparation for the training, the Pentagon said.

“If all goes well, we expect they’ll be finished with training in late summer or early fall,” Army Col. Steve Warren, a Pentagon spokesman, said of the first group.

The United States expects 3,000 Syrians to have completed training by the end of the year and 5,000 to be finished by next April, Warren said.

The training program has been fraught with delays as the Pentagon has struggled to determine how to identify fighters qualified for training. Officials often spoke of employing “moderate Syrian rebels” to battle the Islamic State, but many of the groups fighting the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad were considered too close to al Qaida’s Syrian affiliate, the Nusra Front, to qualify.

In Istanbul, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Friday there had been “a minor delay” in the training plans but did not elaborate beyond saying it was “because of (U.S.) distance,” Reuters reported.

The U.S. and Turkey have been at loggerheads over the program, with Turkey insisting the fighters be allowed to target the Assad government while the U.S. said the training was intended only to fight the Islamic State.

It was not clear Friday whether Turkey had signed off on the first 400 Syrians chosen to start the training program. Both countries must approve the participants in the program.

Under a joint agreement signed in February, Jordan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia have also agreed to host training sites.

Warren said that 2,200 Syrians have been “identified by name” for the training mission and that the United States is “compiling big data” on 400 of them. The background checks are expected to include fingerprints, retina scans and other biometric measurements to learn whether any of the candidates are on terror watch lists.

Asked how the 2,200 Syrians were selected, Warren said they were recommended mainly by “tribal leaders and Free Syrian Army leaders we have been dealing with for some time.”

Warren said a pre-screening process lasting one week will be followed by deeper background checks over six weeks. With those stages extending to mid-May, it was not clear why training won’t begin until September.

“We’re figuring out who these guys are,” Warren told McClatchy. “We want to get people who we trust – from this town, from that family, his wife got killed by ISIS. We rely on trusted agents, especially members of the Free Syrian Army.”

Membership or fighting experience in the Nusra Front “would be a disqualifier” for the training program, Warren said. Fighting with a rebel unit that had allied itself with Nusra also “would potentially be a disqualifier,” he said.

Other red flags Warren cited included gaps in someone’s past and discrepancies between what he said about his background and what U.S. security personnel discover.

“If we can’t account for what he did between 2010 and 2011, that would be a problem,” Warren said.

The training will be “scalable and adjustable,” and could range from several weeks to several months, depending on the planned eventual mission of the fighter being trained, Warren said.

“It would range from individual training in how to use a gun to collective training in how a squad moves through a building,” he said.