IS militants dig in, anticipating assault on Syria’s Raqqa
In an additional lead, investigators identified the voice of a French jihadi convert, Fabien Clain, 36, on the Islamic State claim of responsibility for the Paris strike.
He said the US got a “military notification” that Russian Federation was attacking Raqqa, but said that’s not the same thing as coordination.
Epa05029936 A handout frame grab from video footage published on the official web site of the Russian Defence Ministry 17 November 2015 shows Russian TTu-95MS turboprop-powered strategic bomber releasing a missile against Islamic State targets in Syria.
While Islamic State fighters terrorize Raqqa’s residents, when “warplanes come they start to run like rats” and hide among civilians, according to activists running the “Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently” Twitter account.
The city’s estimated 350,000 people have been rattled by Russian and French airstrikes that shake the city daily. No civilians were killed or injured in Tuesday’s attacks, they said. Shortly afterward, the Islamic State banned people from leaving the city, and activists said it has stepped up enforcement of the ban in the past few days, leading to fears the group intends to use civilians as human shields in future fighting.
The group, by operating with extreme caution, also publishes updates on airstrikes and civilian deaths in the city.
Poverty may be worsening in places such as Raqqa, partly as a result of recent setbacks on the battlefield suffered by the Islamic State, said Columb Strack, a Middle East analyst at Jane’s Information Group. Despite his allegiance to the Syrian government, Shadi said that as a practical matter government airstrikes tended to hit less precisely, whereas American ones had sometimes been accurate enough to kill Islamic State commanders in their cars.
Syrian bloggers claim the coalition campaign is a “failure”, and that Russian bombers aren’t even targeting Isis. Also complicating the global effort is the disagreement between Russian Federation and the United States over whom and what to target. “What we’ve seen in the recent past by Russian Federation is a focus on the opposition groups and on bolstering the Assad regime”.
The White House lacks the local allies in Syria to wage significant land battles against the Islamic State. At least 126 Islamic State militants were killed in the Kurdish offensive, according to the Iraqi Kurdish news agency Rudaw.
Kerry said afterwards that Islamic State was losing ground, but said increased co-ordination with Moscow would require progress in a political drive to end the war. Shadi said the fighters had been pressuring males as young as 15 to join them to “fight the Kurds” and, if they refuse, imposing a “tax” to be used to buy a weapon for a fighter.
“The coalition should take such strategies by the radical group into consideration”.
A bus driver and a bar owner were among the jihadists, most of whom were French and Belgian nationals, while one of them had a passport apparently issued in Syria.