The Army general in charge of the Pentagon’s failed $500 million program to train and equip Syrian rebels is leaving his job in the next few weeks, but is likely to be promoted and assigned a senior counterterrorism position here, American officials said on Monday.

Many people in Nickelsdorf feel completely let down by their government. “It’s like at the end of the war, back when the Wehrmacht surrendered the area east of Bruck on the Leitha to the Red Army and we were left completely defenseless at the mercy of the marauding Russians”, one man remembers the stories his grandparents told him.