Moscow, Washington Make Progress on Flight Safety Issue in Syria

In the face of its brutal offensive through northern Iraq in June, 2014, Mr Obama asked Congress for an initial $500 million to “train and equip” Syria’s opposition fighters, whom he later described as “the best counterweight” to Islamic militants and a key pillar in his campaign to defeat them. “No one in Syria is going to just fight ISIL, they want to take Assad on who has massacred their family, so it was doomed to fail with these restrictions”.

Russian Federation has suffered attacks by militants before, including suicide bombings in Moscow five years ago which killed dozens of people, and more now might turn public opinion against the military intervention in Syria. He questioned whether the U.S. had lived up to either of those standards. The group said the rebels shelled troops in the newly seized territory.

The two countries had “deconfliction” talks the next day via video conference, aimed at ensuring Russian warplanes didn’t cross paths with drones and US-led coalition jets targeting the Islamic State extremist group in Syria.

President Obama this year defined his approach to crises like the civil war in Syria as “strategic patience and persistence”.

NPR’s Tom Bowman reports that the new program will train so-called enablers at a site in Turkey.

The change reflects the failure of the current approach, which has produced only a handful of combat-ready moderate rebels and drawn widespread criticism in Congress.

Calling Russia a proud, important country, Juncker said more normal European Union relations with the Russian government nonetheless require a “massive” change of behavior by the Kremlin after its annexation of Crimea and support for rebels in eastern Ukraine. The Syrian rebel groups that have recently won favour with Washington include Sunni Arabs and Kurds as well as Syrian Christians, U.S. officials have said.

But the Pentagon insisted the “train and equip” programme was only one plank of the overall effort, and noted that it has always been arming groups already inside Syria.

“I don’t think at all this was a case of poor execution”, Wormuth said. When it was launched, the program was seen as a test of Obama’s strategy of having local partners combat Islamic State militants and keeping USA troops off the front lines.

The first broke up after coming under attack from al-Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda affiliate.

The administration has acknowledged that its efforts to attract recruits have struggled because the program was exclusively authorised to fight Islamic State, rather than Assad. The area is held by a rebel alliance that excludes Islamic State fighters.

“The administration has had a weak, inadequate policy in Syria and a weak, inadequate policy against ISIS,” he said as the news broke, referring to IS.

“The discussions were professional and focused narrowly on the implementation of specific safety procedures”, said Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook in a statement”. The Pentagon did not name which groups would receive support. Turkey’s interim deputy prime minister, Numan Kurtulmas, said in an interview with state-run Anadolu Agency published on Friday that foreign forces should stop playing “war games” in Syria, where a new exodus of refugees could be triggered.

Putin also met Abu Dhabi’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who holds a senior post in the armed forces of the United Arab Emirates, another rich Gulf state hostile to Assad.