Syrian activists: 3-day strikes on Raqqa kill 33 IS fighters

France has launched waves of airstrikes against the IS group following attacks that killed at least 129 people in Paris on Friday.

“There is major fear in the city, especially with Daesh preventing civilians from leaving the city”, Khaled said, using the Arabic acronnym for the group.

ISIS militants are bracing themselves for a possible attack on their de facto capital of Raqqa, Syria, as global airstrikes intensify, the Associated Press reports. Iran is Assad’s closest ally.

If the families are leaving, this “confirms that it’s a movement in decline”, said Andre Liebich, honorary professor of global history and politics at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. The fighters are hiding in civilian neighborhoods and preventing anyone from fleeing, activists said. They also are anxious they would be trapped with nowhere to go if U.S.-allied Kurdish and Arab forces in Syria invade the city, according to the former residents who have fled to Turkey and now report on events in Raqqa through acquaintances and activists inside.

To avoid being hit in their bases, the fighters have moved into residential neighborhoods in empty homes abandoned by people who fled Raqqa earlier, said an activist from Raqqa. At least five explosions were heard in the afternoon in the city as warplanes continued hitting the group, they said.

Omar Lamrani, a military analyst at Stratfor, an advisory firm based in Austin, Texas, said Islamic State fighters by now have a well-established routine for taking evasive action when bombed.

“They diffuse their men across the city, they integrate with the civilian population, they don’t really display where their main headquarters to avoid airstrikes”, Lamrani said.

Scores of families of Islamic State (IS) militants and commanders have started relocating from Syria to Iraq after heavy French air strikes, a monitor group reported on Wednesday.

Anti-Islamic State forces are now marching south toward the city of Shaddadeh, an Islamic State stronghold 90 miles east of Raqqa, Kurdish activist Mustafa Bali said.

Russian Federation deployed 37 new aircraft to carry out airstrikes after security officials said the passenger plane that crashed over Egypt’s Sinai on October 31 was caused by a bomb. Russian Federation planned 127 sorties on 206 targets in the first 24 hours of the new campaign, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said.

France has invoked a previously unused European Union article to ask member states for help in its mission to fight back against the Islamic State organisation, which received unanimous backing from Brussels.

Russia’s targeting of the Islamic State pleased the United States government, which had complained that most Russian strikes had targeted moderate rebels, including a few backed by the US, and that the real goal of Russia’s recent air campaign in Syria is not to defeat the Islamic State but to prop up President Bashar Assad in his long civil war.

Hollande will visit Putin in Moscow on November 26, two days after the French leader is due to meet U.S. President Barack Obama in Washington to push for a concerted drive against Islamic State, which controls swathes of Syria and Iraq. He is also anxious about the coalition’s support for Kurdish forces, who have been accused of human rights violations.