Russian air strikes hit militant command centres in Syria – agencies

In this photo made from the footage taken from Russian Defense Ministry official web site, Wednesday, October 7, 2015, a Russian navy ship launches a cruise missile in the Caspian Sea.

“NATO is able and ready to defend all allies, including Turkey, against any threat”, alliance secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg said as the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation meeting began.

Worse still, Moscow was reckless in its military commitment, risking clashes with USA and other planes targeting Islamic State (IS) jihadists in Syria.

One casualty of the fighting has been a senior commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, General Hossein Hamedani.

Like Iran, Moscow has also come to the aid of its ally Assad, and in doing so raised concerns about a proxy war between the US and Russian Federation in Syria.

US officials said they believed four Russian cruise missiles bound for Syria had crashed en route in Iran.

U.S. defence secretary Ashton Carter deplored the fact that Russian warships fired the cruise missiles “without warning”.

“No matter how unpleasant and unexpected it is for our colleagues in the Pentagon and Langley, our strike yesterday with precision-guided weapons at ISIS infrastructure in Syria hit its targets”, the group wrote on its Facebook page, using an alternative acronym for the Islamic State (IS) group.

In the northern province of Aleppo, rebels including the powerful Ahrar al-Sham group on Saturday recaptured one of several villages seized by ISIL in its advance a day earlier, a monitor said.

Russian warplanes struck a base in northwest Syria on Friday belonging to a rebel group that has received USA training, a monitoring group said.

However, the Observatory said there had been no significant advances by government forces backed by allied militia in areas where ground offensives were launched this week.

The head of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Rami Abdurrahman, said the troops moved from the village of Jorin into other parts of rural Latakia and Sahl al-Ghab, a vital plain that lies between Latakia, Hama and Idlib provinces.

Russia’s air force hit more than 60 “terrorist targets” in Syria over the past 24 hours, Moscow’s military said Friday, significantly ramping up its bombing campaign in the war-torn country.