The focus of United States efforts to fight Islamic State militants lies in the U.S. abilities to train Syrian rebels. To that end, as part of an on-going U.S. led campaign to counter Islamic State forces in Iraq and Syria, the Pentagon recently remarked that the U.S. military has made substantial progress in its effort to find moderate Syrian rebels who can be trained for the fight against militants from Islamic State, suggesting a U.S. training mission could possibly begin as early as this spring.

Press secretary for the Pentagon, Rear Admiral John Kirby, outlined that the United States and Turkey plan to reach an agreement this sometime this month concerning training and outfitting moderate Syrian rebel forces. According to a Reuters News Service report, Major General Michael Nagata, commander of U.S. special operations forces in the Middle East, was in the process of talking with Syrian opposition groups in an effort to identify individual recruits that would benefit from training and equipment.

To date, President Barack Obama has authorized more than 3,000 U.S. troops to advise and assist Iraqi forces and to train 12 brigades of Iraqi troops, including three from the Kurdish peshmerga forces. Concurrently, the U.S. began conducting air strikes against Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria last year after the group overran part of northwestern Iraq and Baghdad requested assistance from Washington.

President Obama also approved a mission for the U.S. military to train and equip a moderate force of Syrian rebels to counter Islamic State militants active in Syria, which is in the midst of a civil war between President Bashar al-Assad and his opponents.

Initially, the Pentagon hopes to be able to train up to 5,000 moderate Syrian rebels a year over three years. Although a specific location for training has not been identified, Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia have agreed to host training sites for the rebels.

Well-trained rebel ground support will supplement on-going U.S. led coalition air strikes as well as movements on the ground by Iraqi and Kurdish forces that have thus far blunted the forward momentum of Islamic State.

The U.S.-led coalition has inflicted serious damage on Islamic State, carrying out around 1,000 air strikes so far in Iraq and Syria, but the fight against the militants, remarked U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in recent statements, could last years.

Reinforcing the need for a broader scope of support, Iraq has voiced plans to ask NATO to lend assistance as well in the training of its its security forces, and similarly, the anti-Islamic State coalition remarked that effective ground forces were needed to ultimately defeat the militants.

After Sunni Militants laid claim to large chunks of territory, U.S. and coalition -led air strikes that began in September 2014 allowed Sunni tribal fighters, Kurdish forces and the Iraqi army to recover some ground seized by  the militants.

Rear Admiral Kirby commented further that if the U.S. Continues to make progress that it is currently making, training of moderate opposition could begin by early spring.