According to the Washington Post the U.S. administration is discussing to increase the numbers of CIA trained mercenaries in Syria:
The Obama administration has been weighing plans to escalate the CIA’s role in arming and training fighters in Syria, a move aimed at accelerating covert U.S. support to moderate rebel factions while the Pentagon is preparing to establish its own training bases, U.S. officials said.
The proposed CIA buildup would expand a clandestine mission that has grown substantially over the past year, U.S. officials said. The agency now vets and trains about 400 fighters each month — as many as are expected to be trained by the Pentagon when its program reaches full strength late next year.
The piece mentions training in Jordan and Qatar.
Hurriyet reports that training is also to start in Turkey:
Officials from both the United States European Command (EUCOM) and the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) and high-ranking Turkish military officials agreed on a number of points about the training of Syrian opposition fighters in Turkey.
Free Syrian Army (FSA) members, including Syrian Turkmens will be trained at the Hirfanlı gendarmerie training center in Kırşehir, sources told to the Hürriyet Daily News. U.S. officials will also take part in the training.
The U.S. will primarily provide weapons and ammunition for the Syrian opposition, with the costs of the training also expected to be provided by Washington.
Around 2,000 Syrian fighters are slated to be given military training, which is set to begin at the end of December.
No journalist seem to have asked the administration on what legal basis this training and inserting of mercenaries against the Syrian government is taking place. What please in international or even U.S. law allows a U.S. president to send a proxy mercenary force against the state of Syria or any other state?
The administration knows very well that the legal ground it is standing on is very, very weak. The people it trains are criminals and do not observe basic laws of war or human rights. The administration's solution to breaking the law is trying to change it:
The Obama administration has asked Congress repeatedly to exempt its military effort against the Islamic State from a longstanding ban on U.S. assistance to torturers and war criminals, ..
…
Two similar exemption requests were quietly rebuffed by Congress in a defense bill passed in September, Senate aides said. That bill provided $500 million to train the Syrian rebels and a $1 billion counterterrorism fund for the Middle East.
In both cases, the Obama administration sought to exempt the funding from all human rights restrictions, records show.
Congress so far rejected any change or exception from the Leahy amendment:
The 1997 Leahy Law, named after Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, bars the U.S. from funding military units suspected of "gross human rights violations," which include murder, torture and extrajudicial imprisonment.
All the groups of the Fee Syrian Army the CIA and the Pentagon are training have committed such crimes and are cooperating with terrorist groups.
Reuters recently lauded the success of the Fee Syrian Army in the South where, as we reported two month ago, FSA mercenaries trained by the CIA came from Jordan and, under Israeli artillery protection, captured the Golan height to proceed from there towards Damascus. Reuters deceptively writes:
Assad's forces control Damascus, the Mediterranean coast and much of the area in between. Islamic State, an al Qaeda offshoot, controls the east, while Nusra controls much of the northwest and is expanding at the expense of moderates.
The southern provinces near the Jordanian border are an exception, where rebels calling themselves the "Southern Front" still control territory and have managed to resist Assad while avoiding direct clashes with the Nusra Front.
The FSA/CIA in the south did not only avoid "direct clashes with the Nusra Front" it intensively cooperated with the it. Nusra fighters have been the storm troopers in every battle in the south. (The Syrian army has started a wide counter offensive against these attacks in the south and will likely stop them before they endanger Damascus.)
Extensive human rights violation documented since early 2012 and strong cooperation with terrorists groups are the mark of the anti-Syrian mercenaries the CIA and Pentagon are training. Such training then is illegal under U.S. national law. Obama knows this and that is why he is trying, unsuccessfully for now, to change that law.
Would not Obama's obvious breaking of the law be a nice basis for impeachment procedures?
International law forbids the attacks on sovereign Syria Obama is committing with sending mercenaries to fight the Syrian state. Obama himself just yesterday offered such reasoning:
We believe that nations and peoples have the right to live in security and peace; that an effective security order [..] must be based — not on spheres of influence, or coercion, or intimidation where big nations bully the small — but on alliances of mutual security, international law and international norms that are upheld, and the peaceful resolution of disputes.
Typical Obama platitudes of course – but one wonders why no mainstream media journalist is, for ones, questioning the administration for offering such while doing the opposite of what it proclaims.
Mercenary