President Barack Obama’s recruiting effort to fight the Islamic State in Syria has “failed,” Sen. Bernie Sanders says, calling out Saudi Arabia and other U.S. Middle East allies for not doing enough to help.

On Friday, the Obama administration said it was changing its year-long Syria strategy to arm and train moderate Syrian rebels and refocusing on enabling Kurdish and other combatants to communicate with U.S. warplanes and call in airstrikes. The president had hoped to train the Syrians to battle the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

“Well, it failed. ... The president acknowledged that,” Sanders said about the recruiting effort in an interview airing Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press." “What the president has tried to do is thread a very, very difficult needle.”

The independent senator from Vermont, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, said Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar are “going to have to get their hands dirty as well.”

“Let them start putting troops on the ground,” he said.

For Saudi Arabia, which he said has the third-largest defense budget in the world, Sanders said, “I found it very ironic that they were asking American troops to get engaged on the ground, when they had means to do that.”

Asked about the pressing issue of gun control at home in the wake a series of mass shootings, Sanders said he’d pair “common-sense gun reform” with “a revolution in mental health.”

“If people are having a nervous breakdown or are suicidal or homicidal, they get the care they need when they need it,” he said.

Sanders, who has supported some liability protection for gun manufacturers, called his past vote on the issue a “complicated” one, saying he’s now “willing to see changes in that provision.”

“Here's the reason I voted the way I voted,” the senator explained ahead of the first Democratic presidential debate Tuesday in Las Vegas. “If you are a gun shop owner in Vermont and you sell somebody a gun and that person flips out and then kills somebody, I don't think it's really fair to hold that person responsible, the gun shop owner.”

“On the other hand,” he said, “where there is a problem is there is evidence that manufacturers, gun manufacturers, do know that they're selling a whole lot of guns in an area that really should not be buying that many guns – that many of those guns are going to other areas, probably for criminal purposes.”

“So, can we take another look at that liability issue? Yes,” he concluded.