US trains Syrian civilians to destroy explosives

The United States is getting scores of Syrian locals ready to deal with explosives left behind by a rapidly disintegrating Islamic State (IS).

Over the summer, a State Department-led program trained 120 local Syrians to remove and destroy mines in the northern town of Manbij, where a small number of US troops are deployed, Al-Monitor has learned.

The pilot program did not draw recruits from US-trained units that are fighting to root out nearly 2,000 IS fighters left in Syria. Instead, the program picked up civilians without combat experience and coached them from the ground up.

“We are recruiting and training locals in their areas, from Raqqa, from Manbij, to help clear the contamination that is in their own cities,” Stanley Brown, the director of the State Department’s Office of Weapons Removal and Abatement, told Al-Monitor. “They’re Syrian locals that we had to take from a stage that had never worked with demining to doing clearance operations.”