This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, October 9, 2015. I'm Caleb Brown.

The Pentagon will end its train and equip program for Syrian rebels opting instead to effectively

provide more weapons.

But with both the U.S. and Russian forces involved in Syria and several close calls between those forces,

the U.S. may be drawn into a much deeper conflict.

Emma Ashford, a visiting research fellow

at the Cato Institute, offers her thoughts.

So the big change in the Syrian Civil War

in the last couple of weeks has been the involvement of Russia. They'd always been backing

the Assad regime with money in arms, but now they're actually involved in the

conflict. They've got bombers, flying bombing raids, they're firing

cruise missiles at various groups, and they're doing that in

backing the Assad regime, even though they say they're focusing on ISIS.

And all of that's an addition to the parties already fighting in Syria that includes the US-backed coalition of

countries that are involved in fighting ISIS that includes the Assad regime and

the ongoing civil war between them and a bunch of different rebel groups.

And really it's very chaotic on the ground.

There's a lot of different parties involved.

The Russians might be saying on television that they are fighting ISIS, but really

they are just backing the Assad regime and

some of the groups they're bombing are actually groups that the US through the CIA has

armed and trained recently.

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