Military Strikes in Syria Not Big Financial Burden

Despite a push toward regime-controlled areas by the Islamic State, its militants were not struck by Russian warplanes, activists said. There was no independent confirmation of the death toll.

The Anadolu Agency said Mr Leyla, 27, died in the attack in the town of Hreitan, in northern Aleppo province.

General Salim Idris is jubilant at the successes Free Syrian Army rebels have notched against Assad, whose forces launched ground offensives this week in the center and northwest of the war-torn country with close-ground support from Russian warplanes.

“The terms are being dictated by the Russians.” says Christopher Harmer, former deputy director of operations for the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps said separately one of its senior commanders had been killed this week near Aleppo, Syria’s main northern city.

Islamic State is now within 2 kilometers of government-held territory on the northern edge of Aleppo, which has suffered widespread damage and disease during the civil war that erupted in the wake of protests against Assad. Reuters reported this week that for months Putin was planning his Syria intervention with Iranian officials while misleading the West. Now any hope that the US and Russian Federation could work together on stabilizing Syria has ended.

The report Friday said that Gen. Hossein Hamedani was killed in the suburbs of Aleppo in Syria while “carrying out an advisory mission”, but didn’t provide any further details. USA policy in Syria emphasises “an orderly political transition” in which Arab nationalists vacate the Syrian state, yielding to anti-nationalist U.S. marionettes.

France’s defense minister says French fighter jets fired airstrikes on the Islamic State stronghold of Raqqa in Syria, targeting foreign fighters plotting attacks in Europe.

Islamic State militants swept into villages in northwestern Syria as part of a surprise offensive against rival insurgents Friday, activists said.

Russian Federation now stations at least 20 warships armed with missiles, torpedoes and artillery cannons on the Caspian Sea, military observers say, a surprisingly large force given the absence of regional opponents or conflict around a land-locked body of water beloved of Iranian beachgoers.

Carter, speaking to reporters in London on Friday, said the US “remains committed” to the idea of training rebel forces but said officials “have been looking now for several weeks at ways to improve” the current program.

The nature of the blatant hypocrisy that indulges a medieval tyranny while seeking to regime-change an elected president was spelled out clearly in the pages of The Washington Post by a senior USA official.

The failed train and equip program in Syria was a $500-million initiative requested by the White House in the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act to train 5,400 Syrian rebel forces annually for three years.

Hamedani was a veteran of the bloody 1980-88 war with Iraq.

While one Pentagon official told the Daily Beast this week that he greeted the announced intelligence cooperations between Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Russian Federation “with pretty much a yawn”, Dr. Cordesman of CSIS argues that the cooperation “creates all kinds of complications for the U.S. presence”.

Turkey said on Friday it was concerned about a possible fresh wave of Syrian migrants arriving at its border as a result of Russian airstrikes.