Led coalition asks Russia to concentrate on fighting IS

Reports indicate that many of Russia’s airstrikes, launched on Wednesday, have been focused on insurgent groups fighting the Syrian army instead of the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS), the BBC says.

“But it’s not their battle alone but the whole world, because terrorists target with their dark ideology all humanity, its culture and morals”.

US President Barack Obama warned on Friday that Moscow’s military campaign in support of Assad was a “recipe for disaster.”

Obama suggested that that Russia’s airstrikes, which started this week, damaged worldwide efforts to find a diplomatic solution to the four-year civil war in Syria and the US hope to eventually see President Bashar Assad leave power.

The group is one of at least three foreign-backed FSA rebel factions to say they had been hit by the Russians in the last two days.

Pushkov was speaking a few hours before Putin was due to meet leaders of France, Germany and Ukraine in Paris for talks about Ukraine which were likely to be overshadowed by the conflict in Syria.

Ankara hopes that Moscow’s military operations in Syria will not affect bilateral relations between Turkey and the Russian Federation, the Turkish Hurriyet newspaper said October 2 with reference to the Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu.

The air strikes hit the district of Jabal al-Zawiya, in an area under the control of al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria and other Islamist rebel groups, said the Britain-based monitor.

Moscow starting conducting air strikes on Wednesday, and it insists that it is only targeting IS, with strikes recorded on IS command centres, arms depots and military vehicles. It said that several of these were in Hama and Idlib, provinces with little Islamic State presence.

Earlier, the group had reported that warplanes, believed to be Russian, had also targeted Qaryatain overnight – a town which lies about 80 miles northeast of Damascus.

The West has raised concerns that Russian forces were also striking at rebel groups opposed to Assad, in a bid to bolster its ally.

“The problem here is Assad and the brutality that he’s inflicted on the Syrian people, and it has to stop”, Obama said at a White House press conference.