400 US troops to train Syrian rebels to tackle the 31500 strong ISIS militants

#SyrianRebels #IraqiForces #KurdishForces It is understood that the US Department of Defense has agreed to send 400 troops and hundreds of support staff to train moderate rebels against the 31500 strong Islamic State (IS) militants in Syria. Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia have offered to host the troops but, it is not disclosed as to where they would be drawn from or where they will be based.
The announcement has come soon after senior US officials had met Syrian opposition leaders in Istanbul, Turkey. And, it is believed that imparting such training to the rebels would make them more effective to tackle the ISIS.
The objective of the US is to train more than 5,000 rebels annually for three years and the decision is an expansion in the US training of Syrian rebels which began in March 2013 in Jordan and led by the CIA.
Later, in October 2014 it had been announced that the project would be escalated and a parallel Pentagon program would be established.
US has already sent more than 3,000 troops to into Iraq to train Iraqi and Kurdish forces. But, critics of the training mission are of the opinion that the numbers are too small and too slow to be effective against IS which, the CIA feels, may have as many as 31,500 fighters.