Ending Support to Syrian Opposition
- Don Juice
- Aug 3, 2017
- 1 min read
President Trump has recently ended the covert CIA program to fund and arm the Syrian opposition to overthrow Assad. This was created under the Obama administration with facilities in Jordan and Turkey to eventually force Assad to resign and a compromised between the opposition and the Syrian government instead of toppling him through taking Damascus. This was the strategy so that we didn’t see the repeat of the Libyan and Iraq model where the critical institutions where destroyed and chaos ensued after. However this program was unsuccessful in the end thanks to the intervention of the Russians mainly in 2015. There were some stumbles along the way as well because the rebels complained that they weren’t getting enough firepower like MANPADS which are portable air defense systems but the Obama administration was weary of doing this in fear of it falling into the wrong hands. There was progress made by the opposition up until 2015 when the Russians intervened effectively keeping Assad in power. A major problem with the program is the fact that many of the fighters were not moderate and a vast majority were Islamist who may have hated ISIS but had no problem with Al-Qaeda fighters. Personally I believe Trump was right to end it it because as I said before in my other article about what we should be doing in Syria, the focus should be fighting terrorism not overthrowing Assad. So I think this was a good move, and I support it because it was long overdue.
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