ISIS jihadists kill top Iranian commander in Aleppo

The U.S.is abandoning its goal of training a new force of moderate Syrian rebels and will focus on equipping and supporting established rebels groups already fighting against the Islamic State group inside Syria, officials said Friday.

Human Rights Watch said local groups operating in the central Homs province said that jets that they believed were Russian conducted strikes on the neighboring towns of Zaafaraneh and Rastan, killing another 17 civilians.

Russian Federation launched an air campaign against terrorist organization Daesh in Syria on September 30.

“Probably 60 to 80 percent of the arms that America shoveled in have gone to al-Qaida and its affiliates”, said Joshua Landis, a Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma.

Since Congress first approved money for a Syrian proxy force past year, the USA has slowly set up a program in which it has selected potential fighters from moderate Syrian rebel groups, taken them out of the country to camps and given them arms, equipment and basic training.

As the government operation in the west pushed ahead Islamic State said its fighters had captured five villages in its northern offensive and had killed more than 10 soldiers or militiamen. It said the militants seized the villages of Tal Qrah, Tal Sousin and Kfar Qares north of Aleppo city.

The Army of Conquest, which had made a string of advances against government troops in recent months, has come under attack from Russian warplanes.

“I don’t think there is any simple answer…Further air involvement has become very problematic because of the Russian engagement”.

Under the new approach, the administration will continue to work with a range of groups to capitalize on the successes that Kurdish, Arab and Turkmen groups have had over the last several months driving the Islamic State forces out of much of the Turkey-Syria border region.?

Syria’s army appeared to regain ground Thursday, after chief of staff General Ali Abdullah Ayoub announced “a vast offensive to defeat the terrorist groups” and restore control over opposition-held areas.

Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard Corps said separately that one of its generals had been killed near Aleppo once Syria’s most populous city.

“An (IRGC) war veteran commander, providing military counseling services to the Syrian forces in their fight against the Takfiri terrorists, has been killed while defending the Shiite holy sites in the Muslim country”, the Iranian Fars News Agency quoted a top official of the IRGC as saying.

Guard commanders repeatedly have said Iran only has high-level advisers in Syria, denying it has fighters there.

Iranian officials, including Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, lauded Hamedani’s role in the fighting.

Iran is a major regional ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and has provided military and economic support over the past four years of war in Syria.

Syria’s conflict, which began as an uprising against Assad in March 2011 but became a full-blown civil war after a fierce government crackdown, has killed 250,000 people, according to United Nations figures.

The plain is a natural barrier between areas controlled by Sunni Muslims and the Alawite sect to which Assad and his loyalists belong.