Situation Report: Saudi missiles in Syria; Pentagon shutters training program; more on Kunduz strike; Putin in Baghdad; Syrian offensives; Bergdahl news; and lots more

By Paul McLeary with Adam Rawnsley

Missiles for all my friends. Not all train and equip programs are created equal. While the effort by U.S. Special Forces to train a Syrian force of about 5,000 “moderate” fighters by the end of this year has flamed out, the Washington Post takes a look at the other, more successful U.S. train and equip program in Syria — the CIA’s supply of TOW missiles to rebels.

The missiles have been so successful on the battlefield that the rebels have taken to calling it the “Assad Tamer.” The program has been going on for several years, and during the recent Russian-backed offensive by Syrian forces, rebels have been posting videos of the missiles taking out Syrian tanks and armored vehicles. While a significant capability, the Raytheon-made missiles — coming mostly from the 13,000 purchased by the Saudi government in 2013 — have so far been unable to significantly change the situation on the ground, as Syrian forces continue to push rebels out of their positions in Idlib, Hama, and Latakia provinces.

Not dead, just less oversight! The Pentagon’s scuttled training program may be gone, but the effort lives on. Despite insisting for months that every single Syrian fighter needed to be vetted by U.S. forces before being issued weapons, White House and Pentagon officials on Friday said that actually, the opposite is true. On a call with reporters, Christine Wormuth, the Pentagon’s undersecretary of defense for policy, said only the leaders of various trusted rebel groups will be vetted, and they’ll be trusted to pass out U.S.-supplied weapons and supplies to their troops as they see fit. “We have been working with these groups for months,” she said, and the United States will now “build on that and work with groups on the ground who are already fighting ISIL and provide them some equipment.” She wouldn’t comment on the kinds of equipment specifically, other than to say it will not include “higher-end” weapons like anti-tank rockets and ground-to-air missiles.

The original program may be dead, but like all good Pentagon initiatives, the funding stream lives on. The Pentagon has asked for $600 million to fund it in the 2016 budget, and Capitol Hill appears willing to go along, despite Republican and Democratic lawmakers having recently called the training effort “a joke,” a “total failure,” and “a bigger disaster than I could have ever imagined.”

Kunduz fallout. The Defense Department announced Saturday it would offer payments to the families of 22 Afghan Doctors Without Borders staffers who were killed in a U.S. airstrike earlier this month. The Pentagon is offering to work with the families of those killed, “to make condolence payments to civilian non-combatants injured and the families of civilian non-combatants killed as a result of U.S. military operations.”

Latest Bergdahl twist. The U.S. Army officer who presided over the hearing last month for Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl issued a recommendation that Bergdahl avoid jail time for walking off his post in eastern Afghanistan in 2009, members of the team representing Bergdahl’s said. Unsurprisingly, Bergdahl’s legal team concurred with Lt. Col. Mark Visger’s recommendation that Bergdahl attend a court-martial hearing but receive no time behind bars or any kind of discharge. The case is hardly over, however. U.S. Army leadership still has a say in the matter.

Sheikh Putin. Some in Iraq, frustrated by the allegedly slow pace of U.S. and coalition airstrikes on the Islamic State in their country, are looking to Russian President Vladimir Putin as a potential salvation. There are heroic paintings, songs, and YouTube videos galore portraying Putin as the kind of decisive military leader who might step in to crush the Islamic State.

Good morning from the pre-dawn crew over here at SitRep HQ, and welcome to the new week. As always, we’re more than happy to hear from you. Please pass along any tips, notes, or otherwise interesting bits of information that you may have at your disposal. Best way is to send them to paul.mcleary@foreignpolicy.com or on Twitter: @paulmcleary or @arawnsley.

Business of defense

The Pentagon’s chief weapons buyer Frank Kendall has irritated the defense industry with his criticism of consolidation in the defense industry. National Defense Magazine’s Sandra Erwin takes a look at the options actually available to the Defense Department to stymie the trend and finds that, while the legal authorities may be few, the department can still make companies think twice by opting not to buy from some newly merged companies and by communicating that before a merger takes place.

Russian aggression is causing Eastern Europe to get antsy and spend big on defense. But all of the talk in recent years over the coming age of air and sea power appear to have skipped right by the capital cities hard up against the western border of Russia. The spending in the region is focusing on a variety of armored vehicle programs, especially in countries which share a border with Ukraine. “As a common trait, most programs in the region foresee the deliveries of multiwheel-drive vehicles, as opposed to tanks, in a bid to significantly enhance the mobility capabilities of their respective land forces,” Defense News’ Jaroslaw Adamowski writes.

Syria

The Wall Street Journal provides some background on Brig. Gen. Hossein Hamedani, the senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officer whose death in Syria — allegedly at the hands of the Islamic State — was announced on Friday. Hamedani reportedly played a role in organizing pro-Assad militias for the defense of the regime. While Iran claimed that forces from the Islamic State killed the general, some in Syria claim Hamedani died at the hands of other Islamist rebel groups.

Vladimir Putin pinky swears that Russia will not send a ground force to Syria, according to a recent interview the Russian president gave on television. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov also met with his Saudi counterpart Adel al-Jubeir, who appeared to shift Saudi Arabia’s position on when, precisely, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad must depart from power. Jubeir allowed that Assad could leave after a political transition had taken place, whereas the kingdom’s previous position didn’t entertain such an intermediate role.

Iraq

It can be hard to get a sense of what’s going on within the territory governed by the Islamic State given the group’s restrictive rule and violent hostility to outsiders, but Al-Fanar Media profiles one very interesting source of information about life under the black banners in the Iraqi city of Mosul. Mosul Eye is a blog written by a self-described “independent historian” which provides news of the daily goings-on in both English and Arabic.

Iraq carried out airstrikes on what it claims was the convoy of the Islamic State’s caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and hit a meeting of the jihadi group’s senior leaders, Reuters reports. The attack killed eight officials from the group in western Iraq, but the U.S. military and Islamic State all claim the attack didn’t lay a glove on Baghdadi, whose convoy Iraq claims it hit while en route to the meeting.

Iraq joins the small but growing club of countries capable of carrying out drone strikes, thanks to a recently-revealed purchase from China. Iraq’s Ministry of Defense had a press event over the weekend in which its air force rolled out an armed CH-4 drone, purchased from China. Rumors of the purchase had circulated on social media for months, with furtive pics of a tarp-clad CH-4 shown in unidentified hangars, but the event over the weekend confirmed the purchase. While the United States has sharply restricted its drone exports in the region, China hasn’t hesitated to provide lethal unmanned technology where American exports fear to tread, selling lethal drones to Nigeria and (allegedly) Pakistan, both of which have used them against domestic Islamist insurgents.

Iran

Iran unveiled a new ballistic missile dubbed “Emad” on Sunday, a munition whose estimated thousand-mile range is long enough for the Islamic Republic to strike Israel. Iran has repeatedly said it will not abide by U.N. sanctions restricting international assistance to its missile program, which also prohibits development of missiles that can carry nuclear warheads.

Russia

The Hill rounds up new worries by Congressional officials and cybersecurity firms that Russia may be further strengthening its ties to its domestic criminal hacking groups and using them as instruments of the country’s foreign policy. Congressional officials from the House Intelligence Committee and the House Cybersecurity Caucus as well as cybersecurity firms like Crowdstrike and FireEye say that Russian intelligence feeds off the well-developed cybercrime ecosystem the country has sustained through lax law enforcement, gaining valuable tools and personnel from the country’s criminal underground.

China

In the wake of the Obama administration’s decision to challenge China’s use of man-made islands, a Chinese military official would like you to know that there are more than 200 areas in the waters off China where the People’s Liberation Army could build other man-made islands, none of which would take more than 18 months to finish. That tidbit comes by way Newsweek’s Jeff Stein, who reports on a recent trip to China, where he spoke with a cross section of Chinese military and foreign policy officials. The picture he paints of China’s attitude towards attempts to challenge its territorial claims is one of defiant determination, which could spell trouble as the U.S. pledges to ignore Chinese sovereignty over the newly-built islands.

North Korea

A legally-mandated good time was had by all at North Korea’s military parade on Saturday, marking the 70th anniversary of the founding of the Korean Workers’ Party. Pyongyang disappointed weapons watchers by not including its submarine-launched ballistic missile, which it tested recently. Nonetheless, the event showed off a number of including drones, a new 300-millimeter rocket launcher, and the KN-08 ballistic missile, with an estimated range of 10,000 kilometers, that the country first showed off in 2012.

Air Force

Anxious about the fate of the F-35? FlightGlobal’s James Drew has found the thing for you — a plush F-35 stress ball, courtesy of the U.S. Air Force. It won’t fix those delays and cost overruns, but squeezing it might ease tension in the meantime.

Tweet of the day

Syrian rebels’ Arab suppliers are pledging to step up their support in the face of Russian involvement in the conflict: RT @FrankRGardner #Saudi official: new batch of 500 TOW anti-tank missiles delivered this week to #Syrian FSA rebels

Finally…

Granta has reproduced “Boys in Zinc,” the gripping series of testimonies from families of Soviet soldiers killed in Afghanistan in the 1980s written by Svetlana Alexievich, the recent 2015 recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature.