Terrorists Seize Anti-Tank Missiles U.S. Intended for Syrian Rebels

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) ran a troubling report on Wednesday describing how high-powered anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs) are now in the hands of terrorist groups thanks to years of outside programs for arming various factions in Syria, including the Obama administration’s effort to arm “white hat” Syrian rebels.

As the Journal recalled, this is the program interventionists excoriated President Donald Trump for ending in 2017, but his concern about terrorist gangs gaining access to advanced weapons appear to have been well-founded. The threat of those weapons turning against American positions is one reason to reduce the American footprint in Syria.

It is not just American-made weapons vanishing into the Syrian quagmire. All of the regional and world powers that tossed weapons into the fighting pits of the Syrian civil war have reason to worry about those weapons coming back to haunt them:

"A U.S. program begun in mid-2013 provided weapons including ATGM missiles to rebels fighting the Assad regime in Syria. President Trump later canceled the program, saying in a 2017 interview with The Wall Street Journal that it allowed weapons to fall into al Qaeda hands.

“There is absolutely the possibility that the U.S. may face some of the same ATGMs it has delivered in the past to the Middle East,” said Omar Lamrani, a senior military analyst with the Austin, Texas-based defense-intelligence firm Stratfor. Islamic State and al Qaeda offshoots, among others, now possess American-made missiles, he added.

The Obama administration was eager to arm the Free Syrian Army (FSA) rebel faction until the end of 2015 when Russian intervention began turning the tide of the civil war and U.S. attention shifted to the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and their battle against the Islamic State.

More