The first major Syrian rebel group to receive significant U.S. military aid, Harakat Hazm, announced this week that it was officially breaking up following a number of defeats against a competing rebel group.
Harakat Hazm recently lost hundreds of men and its headquarters to Syria's al-Qaida offshoot, Jabhat al-Nusra, the International Business Times reported.
The group was the first in Syria to receive long-range anti-tank missiles from the U.S., and fought mainly in the northern countryside outside of Aleppo. Weapons were brought in through Turkey via foreign aircraft carriers as part of a classified CIA-led program meant to assist in the ousting of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
The weapons will now be distributed amongst various rebel groups that are both fighting against each other, and fighting to overthrow al-Assad. Some of Hazm's members defected with the anti-tank missiles and light weaponry to more extreme groups in the area, while others were absorbed into a new rebel alliance called the Shamiyah Front, according to The Washington Post.
Other weaponry was reportedly confiscated by Nusra fighters after they overran the rebels' headquarters in Aleppo, the Post reported, though the claims, made on Nusra's Twitter, could not be verified. What appear to be Nusra members can be seen posing with large anti-tank missiles and warehouses full of what seem to be weapon and ammunition storage crates.
Hazm claimed to at one point to have 5,000 fighters, but with the emergence of the Islamic State, the rebel group was forced to focus its efforts on multiple fronts, distracting from its main goal of overthrowing al-Assad. Following its latest defeat, the group said on social media that it dissolved "in an effort to halt the bloodshed," reported the Post.
The Pentagon said on Friday that it has begun vetting a new group of Syrian rebels who are eligible for training and assistance in the fight against the Islamic State group, but stressed that those rebels will not be fighting against President al-Assad, Reuters reported.
