The Obama administration’s approach in Syria is “not working,” said the leader of the U.S.-backed Syrian opposition Wednesday, just as Russia announced it had begun airstrikes inside Syria.
“Unfortunately the current approach towards Syria is not working,” Khaled Khoja, president of the Syrian National Council, said on “Morning Joe.” He said the Obama administration’s approach has led to “chaos.”
“We have to create stability by stabiliz[ing] the free areas [and] strengthening the hand of the moderate opposition,” he said. “Training [a] few people is not working. We have thousands of fighters in Syria, fighting the regime, protecting the civilians. We have to make the ‘train-and-equip’ program faster and much bigger than [it is] now.”
“We have to train the other moderate opposition that are not in this program,” he said. “And we have to protect the civilians first.”
Khoja said the role of al-Qaida in Syria and other Islamist groups has been greatly exaggerated in the media, and that there over now “more than 70,000 fighters” in Syria that are moderates.
U.S. officials said Wednesday that Russian airstrikes near Homs, Syria, appear to be targeting U.S.-backed moderates and other Islamist rebel groups, instead of Islamic State fighters, who are not known to be in that region.
Russia “risks implicating itself in war crimes,” said Khoja. “Russia is not fighting [the Islamic State.] It is using its military force to support the Assad regime’s war against civilians.”
