Personal Opinion

Syria is currently experiencing one of the worse humanitarian crisis of our time. The crisis roots from the Syrian Civil war that started in 2011 between President Assad’s oppressive regime and the countries progressive population. The war has lead to over 250,000 deaths and over 50% of the population living in need of humanitarian aid. With 4.5 million citizens being forced out of their home country, the world needs to come together to help our fellow human beings. Along with humanitarian aid the United States has also been providing aid to anti-jihadist forces such as weapons, training, and air support. I believe the United States should continue our involvement in Syria but go about it differently.

Since the beginning of the conflict in 2011 the United States has committed over 5.6 billion dollars and on July 12, 2016 Secretary Kerry announced another 439 million in humanitarian aid. The US has been providing vital emergency goods to refugees including safe drinking water, food, shelter, protection and healthcare. Without this essential aid from the United States refugees would be more likely to look to The Islamic State for assistance since they would have no other choice. The US should commit more to humanitarian aid so Syrians can get their lives back in the near future.

In my opinion the US should no longer provide military aid to Syrian rebels since they have only one goal. That goal being the victory over President Assad. While the US would like to see that, it is just not possible while Assad has support from Russia. All we can do as of right now is focus on helping innocent refugees and fighting ISIS with our own resources instead of relying on irresponsible rebels.

In 2014, The United States allocated 500 million dollars to train thousands of Syrian rebel fighters in response to the rapid growth of ISIS. The program turned out to be a huge failure that only yielded 60 rebel fighters. Senior officials from the White House and Pentagon admit that the program partially failed because the rebels were more focused on fighting President Assad rather than IS.

Trying to train the rebels ended up being a huge waste of money. The Obama administration responded by cancelling the program and decided to spend the money on weapons and ammo for fighters already in the battle. The administration figured instead of training forces and arming them they could just give weapons to rebel forces without the training. This seemed like a good way to save taxpayers money until US weapons ended up in the hands of ISIS. How does this happen you might ask? Well the answer is quite simple. A report from Amnesty International claims that ISIS acquired these weapons through victories over Syrian rebel forces.

They also receive US weapons from rebels who side with Extreme Jihadist groups as a way to defeat President Assad. The Syrian rebel groups number one goal is to defeat Assad and they will take any help given to them even if it is from ISIS. Syrian rebel groups such as Jabhat al Nusra even pledge their allegiance to Jihad groups to better their chances to defeat Assad.

So if I were to be the President and I was asked what I would do about the Syrian Crisis it would probably be along the lines of increasing humanitarian aid by creating a legitimate, well secured organization to get aid to refugees. This organization would also investigate any potential jihadist fighters with refugee camps and arrest them. I wouldn’t remove complete aid from rebel fighters but I would not give them weapons without extensive investigation on their motives. The US also needs to call on other countries to help, it is a burden but nobody should have to go through what the refugees are.