BEIRUT/AMMAN (Reuters) - Syrian rebels said on Thursday a U.S. decision to halt a covert CIA programme of military aid would mark a big blow to the Syrian opposition and risked allowing jihadists to tighten their grip over the insurgency.

Rebels who have received aid under the CIA programme said they had yet to be informed of the U.S. decision first reported by the Washington Post on Wednesday and confirmed by two U.S. officials to Reuters.

A Free Syrian Army (FSA) commander said the U.S. decision risked triggering the collapse of the moderate opposition, which would benefit President Bashar al-Assad and jihadists linked to al Qaeda that have long sought to extinguish more moderate groups.

Other rebel sources said much would depend on whether U.S.-allied regional states Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey kept up their support to groups fighting under the FSA banner, which had been the focus of the CIA programme.

“We heard nothing about this,” said an opposition official familiar with the program, describing the decision as a complete surprise.

The U.S. decision compounds an already bleak outlook for the Syrian opposition that has been battling since 2011 to unseat Assad, who appears militarily unassailable thanks in large part to staunch Russian and Iranian backing.

The CIA program which began in 2013 funnelled weapons, training and cash to vetted FSA groups via Jordan and Turkey.

It regulated aid to the rebels after a period of unchecked support early in the war - especially from Gulf states - helped give rise to an array of insurgent groups, many of them strongly Islamist in ideology.

The support in some cases included anti-tank missiles that helped the rebels make big advances against the depleted Syrian army, triggering Russia’s intervention in September 2015.

FSA rebels have long complained the support fell well short of what they needed to make a decisive difference in the war against the better armed Syrian army and the Iran-backed militias helping it, including Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

One of the U.S. officials said the decision was part of a Trump administration effort to improve relations with Russia.

Critics of the CIA programme, including some U.S. officials, have also said some of the armed and trained rebels defected to Islamic State and other radical groups.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to comment when asked what he thought about the U.S. move and said only that U.S. President Donald Trump and Putin did not discuss the issue when they met at a G20 summit earlier this month.

“We welcome all the efforts aiming at de-escalation of the situation and building security in the Middle East. It’s OK if that is what it’s all about,” deputy foreign ministry spokesman Artem Kozhin told a news briefing on Thursday, according to Interfax.

NOT IN OUR INTEREST

Before taking office in January, Trump suggested he could end support for FSA groups and give priority to the fight against Islamic State.

A separate U.S. military effort to train, arm and support other Syrian rebels with airstrikes and other actions will continue, the U.S. officials said. The U.S. military support has included backing for Kurdish fighters battling Islamic State.

Groups included in the CIA programme operate mostly in northwestern and southern Syria.

“Certainly this decision will have results and consequences on the Syrian scene, particularly in the north and the south. The halt of support to the FSA by the international community is a factor in escalation of Assad’s strength and the strength of the extremist groups,” the FSA commander said.

Backed by Jordan, FSA groups in southern Syria have helped contain jihadists such as the group formerly known as the Nusra Front, and have gone on the offensive against Islamic State.

FSA groups in northern Syria have had a tougher time withstanding the jihadists. Aid to the FSA in the northwest was temporarily suspended earlier this year following a major jihadist assault against them.

“The Americans have been informing us they have reached serious agreements with the Russians. The Americans are saying they have a new strategy towards Syria which is not like that of the Obama era,” said another rebel commander.

“Is this in our interest? Of course not,” the commander said of the reported U.S. decision. “We are waiting to see.”

Turkey has supported FSA groups outside the CIA-backed channels to advance its interests in northern Syria, notably in its Euphrates Shield campaign last year that carved out a de facto buffer zone at the frontier. </s> US officials say that President Trump has decided to formally end the CIA program to arm Syrian rebel factions, a program that has been active for years, and highly criticized for having seen a lot of the US provided arms ending up in the hands of al-Qaeda and other Islamists.

This arms smuggling scheme had long-standing problems, and was frozen earlier this year because the rebel factions the US was supporting have been fighting one another increasingly, and have been less and less interested in fighting either ISIS or the Syrian government.

This move won’t end the US arming of the Kurdish YPG, as this scheme is wholly independent from the CIA program, and is being run directly by the Pentagon. The factions getting arms from the CIA are mostly based in Idlib, with some smaller groups along the Jordan border.

President Trump has been seen as sour on the CIA program since before he took office, complaining that the US didn’t have good enough intelligence on who the rebels are, and should focus on fighting ISIS. Still, it took quite a few months to finalize this decision.
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• Turkey Wanted Thousands of US Ground Troops for Raqqa Invasion - July 18th, 2017 </s> President Trump’s decision to wind down a covert CIA program that had trained and equipped anti-regime Syrian rebels all but guarantees that Syrian President Bashar Assad will remain in power and leaves the fate of the rebels under a cloud, according to analysts.

But many feel that while the end of such support is a win for Russia and Syria, it was high time to stop a program where supposedly vetted moderate groups fighting alongside jihadi groups, and U.S. weapons often ending up in the hands of extremists.

“This program was not standing up any truly independent actor that could take over Syria in the long run,” Thomas Joscelyn, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told VICE News. “It was very ad hoc, and some of the groups that received support were often allied with al-Qaeda or other jihadi groups in Syria.”

Trump made the decision to scrap the beleaguered program – a fixture of U.S. strategy in Syria since 2013 – following a meeting with CIA Director Mike Pompeo and national security adviser H.R. McMaster in June, ahead of a July 7 meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Washington Post reported Wednesday.

It’s not yet clear how vulnerable this will leave rebel groups who had received support through the program, Haid Haid, a Syrian columnist and non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council, told VICE News.

Details of support provided under the secret program are murky, but it’s known that many of the vetted groups also received support from U.S. partners in the region such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar under the terms of the program.

“We don’t know whether other partners who were channelling their support through the CIA program will also terminate their support, or will they try to find other ways to channel that support,” said Haid. “The answer to that question will determine how much trouble they’ll find themselves in.”

Lina Khatib, head of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House, told VICE News that Trump’s decision represented the “final nail in the coffin” for the program, and ultimately reflected “the U.S.’s pandering to Russian priorities in trying to settle this conflict.”

The anti-Assad forces, long an issue for both Russia and the Syrian president, would’ve been an obstacle to Moscow and Washington’s joint efforts to implement a ceasefire in southwest Syria, a region where the rebels have been most active. The agreement to create de-escalation zones in the southwest, announced following the July 7 Trump-Putin meeting at the G-20 summit in Hamburg, has been hailed by Trump as a positive start to the tentative new cooperation with Russia in the conflict.

U.S. officials have said the shuttering of the train-and-equip program was not a pre-condition for ceasefire negotiations. But one unnamed U.S. official speaking to the Washington Post described the closure of the program as “a momentous decision.” “Putin won in Syria,” said the official.

But Joscelyn said that while the decision had “been framed as something that is appeasing Russia, I think there were probably many other reasons to be concerned about this program and to stop this flow of arms.”

While there was a clear moral case for attempting to help rebels in toppling Assad, he said, the chaotic nature of the Syrian battlefield – which saw supposedly moderate groups fighting alongside jihadis under the banner of the Free Syrian Army – meant there were concerns about the program throughout the U.S. government even prior to the Trump presidency. The covert support program, he said, was “a mess,” which had allowed for U.S. anti-tank missiles to find their way into the hands of jihadi groups.

He cited the example of the Nour al-Din al-Zenki Movement, a Salafist militia active in Aleppo that had received CIA support but later joined forces with al-Qaeda offshoot the Al Nusra Front. In July 2016, footage emerged of al-Zenki fighters beheading a boy.

“Al-Zenki was whitewashed. People pretended it was an acceptable partner in the fight against Assad,” he said. “There needs to be a clear-eyed assessment of who received U.S. support and who actually benefited in Syria.”

Khatib said the decision to wind down the program also reflected it had been a strategic failure. Right from the start, the U.S. supplied anti-Assad rebels with “just enough support to be able to continue to fight the regime but not enough to be able to defeat them,” she said.

“The U.S. thought that in doing so it could push both sides toward a negotiation.” That belief proved misguided, particularly once Russia entered the conflict in support of Assad in 2015, dramatically changing the balance of power.

Senior U.S. officials have said that the covert program will be phased out over a number of months. Separate U.S. efforts to train, arm, and support other Syrian groups involved in anti-ISIS operations will continue. </s> Despite a solid eight months of stories about President Trump considering ending the CIA program to arm Syrian rebels, yesterday’s announcement that he’s ending that program have the rebels claiming they were totally “blindsided” and never expected such a move.

Needless to say, they’re outraged by the decision, saying that the lack of US arms shipments would quickly lead to the collapse of the “moderate” Free Syrian Army, to the benefit of jihadist factions closely aligned with al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front.

This is a surprising claim, particularly for the Free Syrian Army to make, since one of the big knocks on them for years has been how closely aligned they themselves have been with Nusra, with claims that Nusra effectively had been using FSA as a cover to secure US arms.

The “moderate” Syrian rebels, to the extent they ever existed, was largely sidelined much earlier in the war, and as fighting in Idlib recently demonstrates, the real factions of influence left are all jihadists of various stripes. Indeed, a big part of why the US froze the CIA arms program earlier this year was that too many of the weapons were being used by jihadist groups against one another.
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• US 'Furious' Over Turkey Publishing US Troop Locations in Syria - July 20th, 2017 </s> President Donald Trump has decided to end the CIA's covert program to arm and train moderate Syrian rebels battling the government of Bashar al-Assad, a move long sought by Russia, according to U.S. officials.

The program was a central plank of a policy begun by the Obama administration in 2013 to put pressure on Assad to step aside, but even its backers have questioned its efficacy since Russia deployed forces in Syria two years later.

Officials said the phasing out of the secret program reflects Trump's interest in finding ways to work with Russia, which saw the anti-Assad program as an assault on its interests. The shuttering of the program is also an acknowledgment of Washington's limited leverage and desire to remove Assad from power.

Just three months ago, after the United States accused Assad of using chemical weapons, Trump launched retaliatory airstrikes against a Syrian air base. At the time, U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, said that "in no way do we see peace in that area with Assad at the head of the Syrian government."

Officials said Trump made the decision to scrap the CIA program nearly a month ago, after an Oval Office meeting with CIA Director Mike Pompeo and national security adviser H.R. McMaster ahead of a July 7 meeting in Germany with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Spokesmen for the National Security Council and the CIA declined to comment.

After the Trump-Putin meeting, the United States and Russia announced an agreement to back a new cease-fire in southwest Syria, along the Jordanian border, where many of the CIA-backed rebels have long operated. Trump described the limited cease-fire deal as one of the benefits of a constructive working relationship with Moscow.

The move to end the secret program to arm the anti-Assad rebels was not a condition of the cease-fire negotiations, which were already well underway, said U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the secret program.

Trump's dealings with Russia have been under heavy scrutiny because of the investigations into the Kremlin's interference in the 2016 election. The decision on the CIA-backed rebels will be welcomed by Moscow, which focused its firepower on those fighters after it intervened in Syria in 2015.

Some current and former officials who support the program cast the move as a major concession.

"This is a momentous decision," said a current official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a covert program. "Putin won in Syria."

The decision will not affect a separate Pentagon-led effort to work with U.S.-backed Syrian rebels fighting the Islamic State. And the CIA-backed rebels were part of the larger moderate opposition.

Some analysts said the decision was likely to empower more radical groups inside Syria and damage the credibility of the United States.

"We are falling into a Russian trap," said Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, who focuses on the Syrian resistance. "We are making the moderate resistance more and more vulnerable. . . . We are really cutting them off at the neck."

Others said it was recognition of Assad's entrenched position in Syria.

"It's probably a nod to reality," said Ilan Goldenberg, a former Obama administration official and director of the Middle East Security Program at the Center for a New American Security.

U.S. intelligence officials say battlefield gains by rebels in 2015 prompted Russia's direct military intervention on the side of the Assad regime. Some U.S. officials and their allies in the region urged President Barack Obama to respond by providing the rebels with advanced antiaircraft weapons so they could better defend themselves. But Obama balked, citing concerns about the United States getting pulled into a conflict with Russia.

Senior U.S. officials said that the covert program would be phased out over a period of months. It is also possible that some of the support could be redirected to other missions, such as fighting the Islamic State or making sure that the rebels can still defend themselves from attacks.

"This is a force that we can't afford to completely abandon," Goldenberg said. "If they are ending the aid to the rebels altogether, then that is a huge strategic mistake."

U.S. officials said the decision had the backing of Jordan, where some of the rebels were trained, and appeared to be part of a larger Trump administration strategy to focus on negotiating limited cease-fire deals with the Russians.

Earlier this month, five days into the first cease-fire in southwest Syria, Trump indicated that another agreement was under discussion with Moscow. "We are working on the second cease-fire in a very rough part of Syria," Trump said. "If we get that and a few more, all of a sudden we are going to have no bullets being fired in Syria."

One big potential risk of shutting down the CIA program is that the United States may lose its ability to block other countries, such as Turkey and Persian Gulf allies, from funneling more sophisticated weapons - including man-portable air-defense systems, or MANPADS - to anti-Assad rebels, including more radical groups.

Toward the end of the Obama administration, some officials advocated ending the CIA program, arguing that the rebels would be ineffective without a major escalation in U.S. support. But the program still had the support of a majority of top Obama advisers, who argued that the United States couldn't abandon its allies on the ground and give up on the moderate opposition because of the damage that it would do to U.S. standing in the region.

Even those who were skeptical about the program's long-term value, viewed it as a key bargaining chip that could be used to wring concessions from Moscow in negotiations over Syria's future.

"People began thinking about ending the program, but it was not something you'd do for free," said a former White House official. "To give [the program] away without getting anything in return would be foolish." </s> WASHINGTON (NYTIMES) - President Donald Trump has ended the clandestine American programme to provide arms and supplies to Syrian rebel groups, US officials said, a recognition that the effort was failing and that the administration has given up hope of helping to topple the government of President Bashar Assad.

The decision came more than a month ago, the officials said, by which time the effort to deliver the arms had slowed to a trickle.

It was never publicly announced, just as the beginnings of the programme four years ago, were officially a secret, authorised by President Barack Obama through a "finding" that permitted the CIA to conduct a deniable programme. News of the troublesome program soon leaked out.

It joins similar failed efforts to deliver arms and money to groups seeking to overthrow governments that Washington found noxious, most famously the Kennedy administration's disastrous effort to do away with the government of Fidel Castro in Cuba.

The White House had no comment. But the decision is bound to be welcomed by the Russians, whose military has backed Assad's government and relentlessly attacked some of the rebel groups that the United States was supplying, under the guise of helping to eradicate terrorists.

On Tuesday, Iran's foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, charged that the United States had helped destabilise the region, and portrayed Iran as merely defending its interests. Washington, instead, views Iran's aid to the Assad government as part of an effort to restore itself as a major regional power.

From the start, there were doubts that arming disorganised, often internally fractious forces would succeed. Officials in the Obama administration conceded that there was no way to predict the future loyalties of those who received US arms, despite a lengthy vetting process. That problem - getting the weapons into the right hands and assuring they were not passed on to others and used against US troops or allies - plagued the effort soon after it was proposed by Hillary Clinton, who was then secretary of state, and David Petraeus, the CIA director at the time.

Trump's decision was first reported by The Washington Post. But it was foreshadowed as early as April, when the Trump Administration said that ousting Assad, whose government has fought a civil war that has taken roughly half a million lives, was no longer a priority. Instead, the United States and Russia have been discussing cease-fire zones in the country, the first of which went into effect this month.

Those discussions have been possible because Assad, secure in his support from Moscow and Tehran, no longer sees a fundamental threat to his ability to remain in power. And Trump's decisions amounted to an acknowledgment that no escalation of the programme, which began in 2013 in concert with the CIA's counterparts in Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Jordan, was likely to yield a different result.

When it began, the initial objective was to force Assad to the bargaining table, in a series of negotiations that then-secretary of state John Kerry took up in earnest in late 2015. But each agreement - for cease-fires, and deadlines for a political "road map" for elections in the country - fizzled.

Kerry fumed that Obama was not willing to provide the kind of military pressure on Assad that might bolster the diplomacy. Obama, for his part, was leery of entering another Middle East war whose outcome he could neither control nor predict.

The programme became less relevant as the Russians increased their presence in Syria, targeting and badly weakening the CIA-backed rebels, who were the most capable of the opposition fighters. That helped the Assad government claw back and consolidate territorial gains.

"This is a big deal, but it's been a long time coming," Charles Lister, a Syria analyst for the Middle East Institute in Washington, said. "It's the biggest indication so far of the administration's having given up on the opposition."

"After all, the Southern Front has consistently been our most reliable anti-Assad partner," Lister said, referring to opposition forces fighting Assad in the southern part of the country. "It's also the result of strong Jordanian pressure, as Amman has been pushing a freeze for a long time. So it was probably inevitable, but it's nonetheless very significant."

He added that it was "a big mistake in my mind". Other independent experts said it was unclear whether Trump's decision would impact fighters defending areas held by the opposition.

At its height, the programme was run through operations rooms in Jordan and Turkey, supporting rebel groups fighting under the banner of the Free Syrian Army who were deemed not to be extremists.

But the pressure on Assad was not great enough to force him to enter negotiations to end the civil war. Nor was it sufficient to clear the way for the rebel groups to take over major cities or approach the capital, Damascus. The programme also sought to bolster so-called moderate rebels against extremist factions like the Syrian affiliate of al-Qaeda.

When the history of the effort is written - and the documents surrounding it are declassified - historians will doubtless seek to learn why the rebels lost ground for years, to Syrian government forces and their Russian and Iranian allies, and to extremists.

After the rebel's expulsion from the eastern half of the city of Aleppo last year, it became clear that they no longer posed a serious threat to Assad's rule.

But stopping the covert programme, which mainly helped rebels near the Turkish border in northwestern Syrian and along the Jordanian border in the south, will not affect the fight against the militants of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in the east. A different programme there run by the Pentagon is supporting a Kurdish-Arab militia known as the Syrian Democratic Forces. </s> President Trump's announcement this week to end the CIA's covert arming of militants in Syria is an admission of defeat. The US has lost its six-year war for regime change in the Arab country. It's time to wrap it up.Also, Trump's decision does not mean the US and its allies will withdraw ground and air forces from Syria, where they are illegally operating in violation of international law.It would have been politically expedient for Trump to have not pulled the plug on the CIA in Syria. But by doing so, he is bound to compound the anti-Russia hysteria gripping Washington and large sections of the media accusing him of being a "Kremlin stooge".Any rational person would have to agree that the best way to end the violence in Syria is for foreign countries to halt pouring weapons into the country. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has long maintained this logical position: if nations want Syria's bloodshed to stop, as they claim, then they should stop supplying arms and cut out sponsoring militant groups.By its own admission, the US has been funneling weapons into Syria since at least 2013, according to media reports, and probably before that date right back to the beginning of the war in March 2011. Not only the US but its NATO partners, Britain, France and Turkey, as well as regional allies Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Israel. This is an admission of a criminal conspiracy to destabilize a sovereign country by supporting illegally armed anti-government militant groups. It matters little whether these groups are arbitrarily designated "moderate rebels". They are illegally armed.Trump's call was also a brave one because the US media immediately and predictably depicted the move as a "concession to Russia". With the US president already being assailed with endless accusations of "colluding" with Russia in winning the election to the White House last year, his decision to leash the dogs of war in Syria this week only lends more grist to the Russophobia rumor mill.The Washington Post headlined the news with: "Trump ends covert CIA program to arm anti-Assad rebels in Syria, a move sought by Moscow".Several other US media outlets followed suit, making snide comments that the move "will please the Kremlin" and that Trump was "appeasing Putin" by closing down the CIA covert operations in Syria.With contorted logic, US media spin that Trump's shuttering of the CIA program to train "moderate rebels" in Syria may now strengthen the hand of "extremists".The president is accused of capitulating to Putin on Syria. There are mutterings in the US media suggesting that this is what Trump talked about with Putin during their meetings in Hamburg at the G20 summit earlier this month. Especially, during the so-called "secret meeting" in front of 18 other heads of state while at dinner.It was Russia's principled decision at the end of 2015 to intervene in Syria, in accordance with international law, that began to bring the criminal conspiracy to an end. Two years on, the Syrian state is beginning to get the upper-hand over the foreign-backed militant groups that have ravaged the country. Russia's military support has been vital to that impending victory."The shuttering of the [CIA] program is also an acknowledgment of Washington's limited leverage and desire to remove Assad from power," noted the Washington Post.Rather than coming clean and admitting that the US has been engaged in a sordid, criminal war on Syria which it has finally lost, the American media are now spinning Trump's ending of CIA operations as a "concession" to Russia.For all his flaws, and there are many, at least Donald Trump knows when to admit that the US war in Syria is a loser. And despite the carping Russophobia trying to box him in, Trump appears ready to take the right decision to bring this criminal American war to an end. </s> The Dutch government has been supporting an armed group in Syria which has been branded a terrorist organisation by the public prosecution department, current affairs show Nieuwsuur reported on Monday night.

The Netherlands provided uniforms and pick-up trucks to the group known as Jabbat al-Shamiya in 2017, the programme said. Next week, a Dutch jihadi faces court for being a member of the same group.

The equipment was sent to the group as part of a secret programme providing ‘non-lethal’ assistance to 22 rebel groups in Syria from 2015 to the beginning of this year.

According to the public prosecutor Jabbat al-Shamiya is ‘salafist and jihadistic’, ‘strives for the setting up of the caliphate’ and can be qualified as nothing else but a ‘criminal organisation of terrorist intent’.

The fact that the government has supported the organisation in the past could upset the court case, according to legal experts. ‘A court could easily say that it would not convict someone for doing something which had been facilitated by the state,’ Geert-Jan Knops told broadcaster NOS.

Michiel Pestman, who represents the man facing trial in three weeks, told NOS the Nieuwsuur claims undermine the public prosecution’s case.

Stop

The Netherlands has admitted funding Syrian rebel groups but has always maintained they were moderate.

However, this weekend foreign minister Stef Blok and trade minister Sigrid Kaag sent a briefing to MPs explaining that the Netherlands has stopped funding the Syrian opposition in the civil war against president Assad.

The chance that rebel forces will be able to win the civil war is, the ministers say, now ‘extremely limited’. Dutch support for the rebels has ‘not had the desired effects’, the ministers said. The Netherlands had set aside €70m to fund the opposition.

Nieuwsuur says the letter was sent to MPs after it had confronted them with its findings. ‘These findings strengthen our conviction that the decision to stop the funding was the correct one,’ the foreign ministry said in a statement.

Debate

MPs said they were shocked by the Nieuwsuur broadcast and have called on ministers to explain how this could happen.

Much of the information has been declared secret but MPs still want ministers to explain to parliament what has been done. ‘What appears to have happened is exactly what we were afraid of,’ said ChristenUnie leader Gert-Jan Seegers.

In 2015, the CU attempted to have the financial support to Syrian rebel groups stopped but failed to get sufficient support.

Nieuwsuur later published more allegations, claiming that other groups funded by the Netherlands committed human rights violations and war crimes. The broadcaster said it bases its claims on interviews with some 100 ‘rebel leaders’ and people involved with the programme. </s> The Trump administration announced Tuesday it will arm Syria’s Kurdish fighters “as necessary” to recapture the key Islamic State stronghold of Raqqa, despite intense opposition from NATO ally Turkey, which sees the Kurds as terrorists.

The decision is meant to accelerate the Raqqa operation but undermines the Turkish government’s view that the Syrian Kurdish group known as the YPG is an extension of a Kurdish terrorist organization that operates in Turkey. Washington is eager to retake Raqqa, arguing that it is a haven for IS operatives to plan attacks on the West.

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Dana W. White, the Pentagon’s chief spokeswoman, said in a written statement that President Donald Trump authorized the arms Monday. His approval gives the Pentagon the go-ahead to “equip Kurdish elements of the Syrian Democratic Forces as necessary to ensure a clear victory over ISIS” in Raqqa, said White, who was travelling with Defence Secretary Jim Mattis in Europe.

The U.S. sees the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, as its most effective battlefield partner against IS in northern and eastern Syria. White said they’re “the only force on the ground that can successfully seize Raqqa in the near future.”

While White did not mention the kinds of arms to be provided to the Kurds, other officials had indicated in recent days that 120mm mortars, machines guns, ammunition and light armoured vehicles were possibilities. They said the U.S. would not provide artillery or surface-to-air missiles.

WATCH: Turkey hopeful meeting with Putin will lead to change in Syria

The officials weren’t authorized to publicly discuss the matter and demanded anonymity. They described no firm timeline, with the American intention to provide the new weapons to the Syrian Kurds as soon as possible. A congressional aide said officials informed relevant members of Congress of the decision on Monday evening.

The Obama administration had been leaning toward arming the Syrian Kurds but struggled with how that could be done without torpedoing relations with Turkey, which is a U.S. ally in NATO and a key political actor in the greater Middle East. The issue has come to a head now because battlefield progress this year has put the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces nearly in position attack IS in Raqqa, although they are still attempting to isolate the city.

Even with the extra U.S. weaponry, the Kurds and their Syrian Arab partners are expected to face a difficult and perhaps lengthy fight for control of Raqqa, which has been key to the extremists’ state-building project. Raqqa is far smaller than Mosul, which is still not fully returned to Iraqi control after months of combat.

Senior U.S. officials including Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have met repeatedly with Turkish officials to try to work out an arrangement for the Raqqa assault that would be acceptable to Ankara. The Turks have insisted that the Syrian Kurds be excluded from that operation, but U.S. officials insisted there was no real alternative.

In her statement, White said the U.S. prioritizes its support for the Arab elements of the SDF.

Other officials said Trump’s authorization includes safeguards intended to reassure the Turks that the additional U.S. weaponry and equipment will not be used by the Kurds in Turkey. The intent is to restrict the distribution and use of the weaponry by permitting its use for specific battlefield missions and then requiring the Kurds to return it to U.S. control.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is to visit President Donald Trump in Washington next week. An Erdogan adviser, Ibrahim Kalin, met on Tuesday with Thomas Shannon, the State Department No. 2 official.

And in Denmark earlier Tuesday, Defence Secretary Jim Mattis said he had useful discussions with Turkey and described the two countries as working out differences over a U.S. alliance with Syrian Kurds in fighting Islamic State militants.

“That’s not to say we all walk into the room with exactly the same appreciation of the problem or the path forward,” Mattis told reporters after meeting with officials from more than a dozen nations also fighting IS. Basat Ozturk, a senior Turkish defence official, participated.

“We’re going to sort it out,” Mattis said. “We’ll figure out how we’re going to do it.”

Tensions escalated last month when Turkey conducted airstrikes on Kurdish bases in Syria and Iraq. The Turkish military said it killed at least 90 militants and wounded scores. The Kurdish group in Syria said 20 of its fighters and media activists were killed in the strike, which was followed by cross-border clashes.

The instability has concerned Washington, which fears it will slow the effort to retake Raqqa.

“We’ve been conducting military and diplomatic dialogue with the Turks and it was a very, very useful discussion today,” Mattis said at a press conference with Danish Defence Minister Claus Hjort Frederiksen.

Associated Press writers Richard Lardner and Matthew Lee contributed from Washington.
Syrian rebels, who have benefited from the "covert" CIA military aid program, say they have not been officially informed of the U.S. decision to stop this aid, and add that its full impact depends on whether U.S. allies Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey continue to support their fight. A Free Syrian Army commander warns this decision risks triggering the collapse of the moderate opposition.