Iran lawmaker: Cooperation with Russian Federation in Syria ‘successful’

The Islamic State group vowed today to attack Russian Federation and defeat it, as Moscow announced it had intensified its air campaign against jihadists in Syria.

Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter says that the US will co-ordinate with Russia in Syria only to the extent of holding “technical discussions” to ensure that USA and Russian aircraft stay out of each other’s way. “Aleppo now is very unsafe”.

While Putin is wrong to suggest that all of Assad’s opponents are terrorists or Islamic extremists, the line between “moderate” and “extreme” forces can be a shifting one.

On Sunday, U.S.-led forces air-dropped ammunition to the Syrian Arab Coalition battling jihadists near I.S.’s northern stronghold of Raqa.

“The big battle preparations in that area are clear”, said one of the officials familiar with the plans.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights also reported Wednesday that Iranian troops were arriving in Syria and were transported to the military base in the town of Jableh. There is also little appetite in the White House for a U.S.-enforced no-fly zone in Syria, officials say.

“If we don’t have somebody there now that is beholden to the United States”, he said, “then we’re going to have nobody in that post Assad game”. “Resolving the matter through politics is the only solution that most suits the interests of the Syrian people”, the editorial said. The Pentagon program required fighters to promise to take on only the Islamic State, not the Syrian government, and managed to put into action fewer than 80 men.

“We can get a lot of use from Russian intelligence, even if they don’t do air strikes”, Zamili said.

The government of President Bashar al-Assad has been strengthened by two weeks of Russian air strikes that the Kremlin says are targeting Islamic State.

Abdulrahman said insurgents sent to Kafr Nabuda – many of them from jihadist groups – had helped prevent the army from recapturing the town.

Foreign states opposed to Assad have supplied the TOW guided missiles to a number of rebel groups via an operations room in Turkey, one of the states in the region that wants Assad gone. A Russian official said Monday that Russian forces were ready to cooperate with the anti-Assad militant group in order to fight ISIS.

But TOW missiles aren’t created to shoot down Russian jets and helicopters.

China’s ruling Communist Party on Tuesday chided both Moscow and Washington for having an outdated Cold War mindset, saying they must not allow the conflict in Syria to develop into a full-blown proxy war.

The Observatory’s director, Rami Abdulrahman, said the rebels were using significant numbers of TOWs.

The strikes have been concentrated in Hama and Idlib, often striking Islamist and other rebels instead of IS.

That isn’t all. The administration’s halting and half-hearted efforts to build up “moderate” fighters in Syria to take on Islamic State have made it easy for Putin to argue that the superior strategy for suppressing that group is to shore up Assad. “That’s at least indirect pressure on the Russians to either stop or do more”.

Beyond its consequences for Syria, Russia’s offensive is part of a larger attempt to assert influence that the US and its allies need to counter.

It said IS units lost most of their ammunition and heavy weapons as a result of the airstrikes – a claim that was not independently confirmed.