"They were assigned the IA mission, meaning inter-agency, as a part of the CIA’s Timber Sycamore covert operation to train and arm so-called moderate Syrian rebels." "Exception J probably provides enough of a legal loophole for the CIA to train terrorists once DOJ and the White House of signed off on paperwork carefully written by a team of lawyers. The triad of nations which are adversarial to the United States, Russia, China, and Iran, who are sponsoring the Syrian regime may have been enough to warrant, in the CIA and White House’s eyes, the arming of nefarious organizations in a deadly proxy war. The White House and the Department of Justice have to be providing paper to the CIA for these actions, as senior management at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia won’t move without adequate protection for themselves. In this scenario, the CIA treats their Special Forces trainers as de facto expendable assets, using them to train known jihadists, when it was only a matter of time before something went wrong."