Turkish FM meets Kerry over Russia’s Syria strikes

Russian jets struck targets near the cities of Hama and Homs in western Syria.

Putin’s United Nations speech and Moscow’s military actions in Syria make clear that this hope is a pipe dream. The annotations on the image were made by the source and indicate the center of the target, and its direction, yellow.

“From the airbase of Hmeimim, the Russian aviation group is continuing to ramp up air strikes using high-precision missiles against the ISIS (Daesh) facilities in Syria”, it said.

Global player Putin, alive to the opportunity to burnish his credentials as a global player and mindful of the importance of Russia’s naval station at the Syrian port city of Tartus, its only remaining overseas military base outside the former Soviet Union, probably felt the need to “bolster the regime” at its moment of weakness, says Yezid Sayigh of the Carnegie Middle East Centre in Beirut.

Turkey’s president says Russian airstrikes that have targeted a few foreign-back insurgents in Syria are unacceptable and warned Moscow that it runs the risk of alienating itself in the region.

Of further concern is the prospect of the US and Russia getting drawn into a shooting war in the event that Russian warplanes hit moderate Syrian rebels who have been trained and equipped by the USA and received promises of USA air support in the event they are attacked.

Political commentator Yulia Latynina said Russian Federation wants to see the destruction of the Islamic State.

“We are ready for such information attacks”, he said in a live broadcast from the Kremlin.

In contrast, Otto said the USA military and its allies have been exceptionally cautious in selecting targets in Syria and Iraq, to the point of slowing down their campaign of airstrikes until they can be sure that no civilians are present.

But USA officials acknowledged after the agreement was struck that they had not agreed on which Syrian rebels they would support in that zone.

Good grief. Russia, with its inferior military and hemorrhaging economy, had just eaten Carter’s lunch, seizing the initiative and exposing American powerlessness – and the secretary of defense deplores what? “It’s easy, then, to exchange factual data where you’re going to operate”. USA officials acknowledge they really don’t know what Russia’s intentions are. “The weak points are where the Syrian army is fighting against IS and other terrorist groups”. A few of those Chechen extremists are part of the coalition that controls Idlib. As for the Russians, they won’t commit ground troops to fight Islamic State jihadis.

Col.-Gen. Andrei Kartapolov, a top official in the Russian military’s general staff, said Russian pilots had flown more than 60 sorties since September 30, targeting IS command posts, ammunition storehouses and weapons-production factories.

“It should have started a long time ago”, he added, speaking by phone and asking not to be identified for fear of repercussions for speaking to a foreign news outlet.

“The steps Russian Federation is taking and the bombing campaign in Syria is unacceptable in any way for Turkey…”

More than four million people have fled the Syrian conflict, with hundreds of thousands heading to Europe, which is now facing its worst migrant crisis since World War II.

“We also said that we needed a political solution for Syria that should take into consideration the opposition’s interests and that opposition has always had our support”, Merkel added.

“The USA military attache to Iraq was the first to be informed by our representative in Baghdad, Gen. Kuralenko, on Wednesday morning”, Kartapolov said, according to Tass.

Tensions between the USA and Russia are escalating over Russian airstrikes that apparently are serving to strengthen Syrian President Bashar Assad by targeting rebels – perhaps including a few aligned with the US – rather than hitting Islamic State fighters it promised to attack.