Cameron: Russian military action in Syria is a ‘terrible mistake’

He said he believed the raid was carried out by Russian jets.

At least 12 jihadists from the Islamic State group have been killed in Russia’s first air strikes on the extremist faction’s main Syrian bastion, a monitoring group said.

A Defense Ministry official, Igor Konashenkov, later told Russian news agencies the Air Force had conducted 14 flights in Syria on Friday and made six strikes against ISIS targets.

It said Russian Su-34 planes struck “an IS training camp near the village of Maadan Jadid”, 70 km east of Raqa city, and “a camouflaged command post at Kasrat Faraj, southwest of Raqa”.

He said their bodies were transported to a hospital in the province.

In Damascus, an unnamed Syrian military official was quoted by state TV as saying that the “concentrated and precise” airstrikes destroyed a command center in the central town of Latamneh in Hama province and targeted positions in the northwestern areas of Jisr al-Shughour and Maaret al-Numan.

Russia’s targets included the IS stronghold of Raqqa, but also Aleppo, Hama and Idlib – provinces with little IS presence.

A new wave of Russian airstrikes in Syria has targeted the west and northwest of the country, according to a military source and state television.

“ISIS is not like Al-Qaida who often fled after attacking an area”, Lavrov said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and French President Francois Hollande met in Paris after a week of frenzied global activity around Syria that finally broke into yesterday’s meeting, which was supposed to have been only about Ukraine.

Moscow supports the regime of President Bashar al-Assad and says it is targeting ISIS, al Nusra and “other terrorist groups”. The US-led coalition has pretended to bomb Daesh (another name for Islamic State) for a year, without results.

Putin said the only way to combat “international terrorism” in Syria is to “take preventive steps and liquidate insurgents and terrorists in the areas they control without waiting for them to arrive to our homes”.

It was the second straight day of Russian raids in Syria, where Moscow on Wednesday launched its first military engagement outside the former Soviet Union since the occupation of Afghanistan in 1979. “We are not going to cooperate with a Russian campaign to simply try to destroy anybody who is disgusted and fed up with Mr. Assad’s behavior”.

Obama on Friday warned that Moscow’s aggressive military campaign in Syria was a “recipe for disaster”.

In a rare joint statement, leaders of France, Germany, Qatar, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the USA called on Friday for Russian Federation to immediately cease its airstrikes on Syrian rebel fighters and civilians and concentrate on hitting Islamic State (IS) group militants.