Air strikes southeast of Syria’s Raqqa kill 23 people

The Russian military said on Friday that its warplanes killed more than 600 militants in just one week while backing the Syrian army’s offensive against IS. The fatalities there included eight children. The deployment also includes a part of an artillery battery that can fire 155-millimeter shells from M777 Howitzers.

In that case, a force from the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, of Camp Lejeune, N.C., established a fire base south of the city in support of Iraqi and Kurdish troops who were then carrying out operations to isolate Mosul from Islamic State-held territory around it.

United States officials admitted the new policy could lead to an increase in U.S. troops in Syria – where US-backed Arab and Kurdish forces are surrounding Raqqa. It outlined a strategy that would likely increase the number of USA troops in Syria in order to better advise and enable the US -backed Syrian fighters who will take on the battle for Raqqa, the terrorist group’s urban stronghold in that country.

The outposts are created to support local troops as they move into ISIS-controlled cities, and where USA troops backing those local forces can be based.

U.S. commanders in Iraq and Syria would be free to decide when to use the new forces.

He added that a new shipment of armoured personnel carriers had been supplied to the Syrian Arab Coalition, part of the SDF which has been vetted by the US -led coalition, since an earlier delivery was announced in late January.

The United States has sent a Marine Corps artillery battery into Syria to help defeat the Islamic State group in Raqa, the capital of their supposed caliphate, a USA official said.

USA troops numbering 500 have previously been deployed inside Syria to advise and assist local Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a group of 45,000 Syrian Kurdish, and Arab rebel forces fighting ISIS, according to the US official.

The spokeswoman for the Syrian Democratic Forces said on Friday that their numbers are increasing, with residents of areas newly liberated from IS joining the ethnically mixed force.

The Marine deployment also risks antagonizing U.S. -NATO ally Turkey. Despite US President Donald Trump’s insistence about remaining quiet before launching an offensive, SDF spokesman Talal Silo said, “we expect that within a few weeks there will be a siege of the city”.

“We do not want our ally, the U.S., to continue to ally with a terrorist organization that is targeting us”, said Cavusoglu.

In a video posted to the veteran community site Funker 530 on Monday, American forces reportedly operate a Stryker fighting vehicle in Manbij, Syria. This represents an increase of almost 50 percent compared to the same period in 2016, and is almost double the number of airstrikes conducted in 2015.

The group Airwars, which monitors airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, has estimated that as many as 370 Iraqi civilians have been killed in the U.S. bombardment of the densely populated neighborhoods of western Mosul just since March 1.

But it is still seen as ill-equipped for the hard assault on militants entrenched in the city.

The military’s estimates of civilians killed by coalition air strikes are generally far lower than those of monitoring groups.

Army General Joseph Votel, the CENTCOM commander, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that “as we move more towards the latter part of these operations into more of the stability and other aspects of the operations we will see more conventional forces requirements perhaps”, as quoted by Stars and Stripes.