Washington: In an acknowledgment of severe shortcomings in the effort to create a force of moderate rebels to battle Daesh in Syria, the Pentagon is drawing up plans to significantly revamp the programme by dropping the fighters into safer zones as well as providing better intelligence and improving their combat skills.

The proposed changes come after a Syrian affiliate of Al Qaida attacked, in late July, the rebel group of the first 54 Syrian graduates of the military’s training programme. A day before the attack, two leaders of the US-backed group and several of its fighters were captured.

The encounter revealed several glaring shortcomings in the programme, according to classified military assessments: The rebels were ill-prepared for their mission and were sent back into Syria in too small numbers. They had no local support from the population and had poor intelligence about their foes. They returned to Syria during the Eid holiday, and many were allowed to go on leave to visit relatives, some in refugee camps in Turkey - and these movements likely tipped off adversaries to their mission. Others could not return because border crossings were closed.

The classified options now circulating at senior levels of the Pentagon include enlarging the size of the groups of trained rebels sent back into Syria, shifting the location of the deployments to ensure local support, and improving intelligence provided to the fighters. No decisions have been made on specific proposals, according to four senior Defense Department and Obama administration officials briefed on the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential planning.

“As with any difficult endeavor, we expected setbacks and successes, and we must be realistic with those expectations,” Capt. Chris Connolly, a spokesman for the US military task force training the Syrian rebels, said in an email. “We knew this mission was going to be difficult from the very beginning.”

The Pentagon effort to salvage its flailing training programme in Turkey and Jordan comes as the world is fixated on the plight of thousands of refugees seeking safety in Europe from strife in the Middle East, including many fleeing violence of the Syrian civil war and oppression in areas under the control of Daesh. Officials in Washington and European capitals acknowledge that halting this mass migration requires a comprehensive international effort to bring peace and stability to areas that those refugees are now fleeing.

The 54 Syrian fighters supplied by the Syrian opposition group Division 30 were the first group of rebels deployed under a $500 million train-and-equip programme authorized by Congress last year. It is an overt programme run by US Special Forces, with help from other allied military trainers, and is separate from a parallel covert programme run by the CIA.

After a year of trying, however, the Pentagon is still struggling to find recruits to fight Daesh without also battling the forces of President Bashar Al Assad of Syria, their original adversary.

The willing few face screening, but it is so stringent that only dozens have been approved from among the thousands who have applied, and they are bit players in the rebellion. The programme has not engaged with the biggest, most powerful groups, Islamist factions that are better funded, better equipped and more motivated. Even the programme’s biggest supporters now concede that the goal of generating more than 5,000 trained fighters in the first year of the programme is unrealistic.

With the White House ruling out sending US advisers into Syria with the trainees, the biggest challenge may be deciding where and how to send the rebels back in.

“We don’t have direct command and control with those forces once we do finish training and equipping them when we put them back into the fight,” Brig. Gen. Kevin J. Killea, chief of staff for the US-led military operation fighting Daesh, told reporters in a video teleconference at the Pentagon on Friday. “If I had to point to a place where we could explore better lessons learned, that would be it.”

At least one part of the training programme worked well: the ability to provide real time air cover for the rebels once back inside Syria. Predator drones quickly rushed to help the Division 30 fighters once they came under attack from the Nusra Front, Al Qaida’s affiliate in Syria, killing dozens of the attackers, US officials said. Nonetheless, Pentagon planners are reviewing their support for rebels both before and after they are sent back to the battlefield, to see how it can be improved.

Two Syrian rebel commanders interviewed recently in Turkey with fighters in the US programme described an initiative that had struggled from the start.

The group meant to accept the training programme’s graduates, Division 30, was created from scratch this year, and commanders of mostly small fighting groups from different parts of Syria were asked to submit names of fighters for training.

While most of the fighters were Sunni Arabs, Nadim Hassan, an ethnic Turkmen whom few people had heard of before, was named as its leader, a decision many rebels felt had been imposed by the Turkish government.

Some commanders were eager to participate. “It was supposed to be an organized army where no one had benefits over anyone else,” said Abdul-Razaq Freiji, who had defected from the Syrian army early in the uprising and led a small fighting group near the central city of Hama. “We are military men and we like order, so we wanted training and organization.”

The trainees were to get good weapons and monthly salaries ranging from $225 for soldiers to $350 for officers, Freiji said.