It's worth one more look at US policy in Syria. President Trump has ended the program that supposedly covertly trained and armed the moderate Sunni rebels in Syria. To say the least, that program was a failure. It turned out that there really aren't that many moderate Sunni rebels. Among the Sunnis who were fighting the Assad regime, America had a choice of ISIS (clearly not moderate), al Qaeda (ditto), the Moslem Brotherhood (basically ditto) and the Kurds (who are not Arabs). There were small numbers of other Sunnis, but not enough to matter much. There certainly was not enough of a force to take control of the country. President Obama started the program of arming and training the moderates, but after two years and half a billion dollars, it had only trained about 50 soldiers. Since then, a more serious effort was made, but it too failed. President Trump's move in ending the program is just a recognition of its failure. It lets the USA focus on defeating ISIS without worrying that we are arming and training other terrorists.
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