Following Russian Airstrikes, ISIS Advances on Aleppo

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. In previous updates Russian Federation has reported hitting 10 targets daily. “It’s back and forth”, said Rami Abdulrahman, director of the Observatory.

Obama argued that Putin’s decision to launch airstrikes in Syria is meant to prop up President Bashar al-Assad, a desperate move to maintain Russia’s lone foothold in the Middle East. “Yes they are participating”.

But they also have very different friends, and sharply opposing views of how to resolve the four-year-old Syrian civil war, in which more than 250 000 people have been killed and more than 10 million driven from their homes. No group has claimed responsibility.

As many as four of the 26 long-range cruise missiles that Russian Federation said it fired at Syrian targets landed instead in Iran, US defense officials said Thursday.

“The effective range of the Russian cruise missiles came as the biggest surprise as the 1,500 kilometers they covered before hitting their targets is at stark variance with their declared range of just 300 kilometers”, the BBC quoted Russian military expert Andrei Soyustov.

French Rafale warplanes attacked an IS training camp in their stronghold of Raqqa overnight.

The Western-backed Free Syrian Army also has a presence in the area, while the Islamic State has a limited presence in western Hama, where activists reported no fighting or airstrikes.

The USA secretary of state, John Kerry, had a 30-minute telephone call with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, to express concern that Russia’s targets in Syria were not related to Islamic State.

The ISIL offensive has brought the group closer than ever to Aleppo, threatening to further complicate the situation in Syria’s second city which has always been divided between government and rebel control.

Assad’s longtime ally, Russian Federation launched its air campaign in September, saying it would also target ISIL. However, there were other militants in northern Syria, such as Chechens, that Russian Federation might want to attack.

“They appeared to help operations by Iranian-backed Hezbollah” in Syria, where the powerful Lebanese Shiite group has been fighting alongside regime forces, the official added.

Hossein Hamedani, a top Iranian commander, was killed Friday by Islamic State as Iran continued to ramp up its involvement with Syria, according to the Atlantic.

An Iranian official, Hamidreza Taraghi, who is close to the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, laughed at the report that missiles had crashed, calling it “complete nonsense”.