Monitor: Russian airstrikes in Syria kill 42, including 27 civilians

Jund al-Aqsa boasted of victory in Morek on its Twitter account but a Syrian security source insisted fighting was ongoing and denied a major setback.

A rebel commander on the ground said Morek had been “liberated”, describing it as strategically important. Knowledge of the terrain is cited as a crucial advantage. Iran, of course, is doing precisely the opposite-organizing thousands of Iraqi Shia militia groups to fight on Assad’s behalf, deploying additional Quds Force operatives to advise pro-Assad military units on the ground, and funneling plane-loads of ammunition and weapon to government forces.

New supplies of weapons from friendly states have arrived, though not in the quantities the rebels would like given the scale of Russian and Iranian intervention. “After the Russian airstrikes you had more boys thinking of signing up thinking they want to fight Russia or fight the U.S.”. If Syria was in the midst of a civil war in 2012, the country is now in the throes of a proxy war with Iran, Russia, and Hezbollah on the side and the United States, the European Union, and the Gulf states on the other.

“The progress is studied, and happening according to the plan”.

That truth, so critical to understanding the roots of the conflict and why Assad must be deposed, has been largely sidelined by the focus on combating the Islamic State, or IS.

One of the biggest government offensives so far is south of the city of Aleppo.

Arsal is a Sunni Muslim enclave in mainly Shiite eastern Lebanon and hosts many Syrian refugees as well as rebel fighters in the surrounding countryside.

Iran’s presence at these talks creates a need to understand its position on Syria, the strength of its support for Assad, and the role it is likely to play over the coming months in negotiating an end to the crisis. Iran can not “give away” this country because of the hard clinch with Saudi Arabia, which in turn will do anything to prevent Syria from being Iran’s outpost in the Arab world. Ambassador, thanks so much for speaking with us.

“The regime is collapsing and only the Russians are propping them up”, said Ahmed Saoud, a commander in the 13th Division, another American-based FSA faction that has gotten new infusions of TOWS and ammunition. The percentage of British tourists in Egypt is significant and our own involvement in conducting air strikes in Iraq provides the exact provocation ISIS needs to launch an attack on our own citizens. “We fire 15 TOWs and we get 15 TOWs in return”, he said. “We camouflage headquarters, and cars, and dig trenches”, he said.

The surprising factor in this scenario is that Russian military spending is nowhere near to what Washington spends on its military.

The Observatory reported government forces and their allies had captured a village in Latakia province on Friday.

Nine people, including a child, were killed in strikes on areas in the town of Maaret al-Numan, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, while another two women were killed in Saraqeb in the same province. It did not have a figure for the number of rebels killed in ground battles.

“Putin runs on moving ice”, said Dmitry Oreshkin, senior researcher and political analyst at the Geography Institute think tank in Moscow.

“But it is still early to judge where the offensive’s top priorities will be, let alone the eventual results”. “The problem is that it’s hard, if not impossible to know what these insurgencies will become if they come to power”, Farkas said.