[omurphy27]

Are those locations occupied exclusively by Al Qaeda? The only evidence you've shown is that the CIA has given arms to rebels in areas where Al Qaeda and its affiliates are known to operate.

I see no evidence that the CIA directly gave weapons to Al-Nusra or other Al-Qaeda affiliates. And zero evidence of any direct funding or support of ISIS as conspiracy theorists and Putin propagandists love to assert.

It's possible that these weapons fell into the hands of Al-Qaeda, but more evidence needs to be presented and it's doubtful that arming Al-Qaeda was ever the original intent.

As for arming the SDF/YPG, that has been well known and public for awhile. Morever, the Kurdish forces are pretty much the only ones actually making significant progress against ISIS and will likely be the ones to free Raqqa. Arming and supporting them is completely justifiable, just as supporting the Iraqi army in their fight against ISIS was and remains justified.

[Chathamization]

> Are those locations occupied exclusively by Al Qaeda?

They aren't; there are even areas controlled by the Syrian government. Here's a map of Idlib that someone tried to make recently[1]; HTS is the group that includes al Qaeda/al Nusra (though it should be noted that al Nusra is officially no longer part of al Qaeda). I don't think any Idlib groups are currently being aided by the U.S. either (unless I missed something); the CIA program was ended, and the DoD program seems to mostly support SDF (and I believe a small amount of support to other groups like the al Tanf rebels).

There are plenty of reasons to criticize the CIA effort to arm various rebel factions, but it's a shame that misinformation stating that the CIA armed al Qaeda is being spread around and accepted uncritically.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/syriancivilwar/comments/6yovaq/map_...

[mhermher]

The best known example is that the CIA did in fact support nour al din al zinki, who were literally fighting side by side with nusra in Aleppo (and now in idlib) in the same operation group. So you have various groups coordinating and working together with some light delineation between them. That's how technically the CIA can deny that they ever directly armed al qaeda.

[balance_factor]

> I see no evidence that the CIA directly gave weapons to Al-Nusra or other Al-Qaeda affiliates. And zero evidence of any direct funding or support of ISIS

You stick a very key word there, directly. In fact the US is who funded and armed Osama bin Laden and his followers jihad against the secular government of Afghanistan in the late 1970s and 1980s - but the CIA did it via the Pakistan ISI. The Maktab al-Khidamat actually had connections to organizations all over the USA.

The US press says Cambodia was taken over in 1975 by communists led by Pol Pot, and in a de facto sense that is somewhat true but in a strict de jure sense it is not. Sihanouk, the Cambodian king who had been ousted by a CIA-backed coup by Lon Nol was who officially ran the government. He was in a political, governmental and military coalition with the communists. The US government and press saw his role as a figurehead and it's not that inaccurate. OK, the Cambodian communists are ousted in the 1979 and suddenly the US is looking to oppose Vietnamese communist influence in Cambodia. So who do they fight to keep the UN seat of? Who does US intelligence fund and arm? The political/military coalition of Sihanouk and the Cambodian communists. Which in the 1970s was called the Khmer Rouge. But suddenly things aren't happening directly, and the fig leaf of Sihanouk and other minor figures and groups becomes much bigger. This was reported in the New York Times at the time, and Nightline went even further, taking a camera crew to Cambodia and showing exactly what was going on - that the US was arming the "Khmer Rouge" rebels whom it had been accusing of genocide a few years earlier.

If a direct link is what is needed then you're not going to find much, as they're not that dumb and incompetent.

[curiousgal]

>fell into the hands of Al-Qaeda

If you’re spending billions on weapons I doubt you didn’t make sure they go to the right person.

[rtkwe]

Even with a perfect screening process for the initial deliveries it's really easy for weapons to end up in unintended hands just as positions/territory are taken and lost by the various sides.

[zeep]

> really easy

meaning more than 50% of weapons?

[rtkwe]

If the chosen groups are crushed or loses a lot of territory yeah pretty easily.

[zeep]

at that point, they should have stopped sending anything (or probably much earlier)