New US-Russia military talks seen on Syria air safety

There was no independent confirmation of the death toll.

Islamist rebels including the powerful Ahrar al-Sham group were able overnight to recapture a village from ISIS, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Assad and his allies, Russian Federation and Iran, say he is a bulwark against all manner of terrorists, including the Islamic State. Today’s strikes were the largest since Russian Federation began launching airstrikes in Syria.

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.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a frequent critic of Obama’s Syria policy, said Friday that continuing to insist that rebels fight only against the Islamic State is a “fundamental flaw” of the revised us approach. “That’s exactly the kind of example that we would like to pursue with other groups in other parts of Syria going forward”.

The ministry said its SU-34, SU-24M and SU-25CM fighter jets carried out 67 sorties over the past 24 hours. A second group that had just entered Syria from Turkey turned over U.S.-supplied ammunition and vehicles to the same group in return for “safe passage” through their territory. But it has also heavily hit rebels on the front-line against Syria’s military, raising accusations that it is intervening to boost Assad in the civil war, now in its fifth year, after a series of losses by his military.

Meanwhile, the United States is dropping a $500 million Pentagon program to train Syrian rebels fighting the administration of President Bashar al-Assad, the New York Times reported on Friday, citing unidentified Obama administration officials.

Cook told reporters traveling back from Europe with Defense Secretary Ash Carter that the Russians sent a formal reply and department officials are now reviewing it, but he provided no details.

He said North Caucasus-based Islamist groups “can probably manage one or two spectacular attacks in the cities of “mainland” Russian Federation”, but that staging a whole series is probably beyond their capability. Western officials say Iran and the Shiite Hezbollah group that it supports in Lebanon are more deeply involved in the fighting.

Securing those areas would help consolidate Assad’s control over Syria’s main population centers in the west of the country, far from the Islamic State strongholds in the east.

The BBC’s Jim Muir in Beirut says Russian air strikes seem to be mostly hitting other Syrian opposition forces which pose more of a threat to the Syrian government.

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

A state television report said that Gen. Hossein Hamedani was killed in the suburbs of Aleppo while “carrying out an advisory mission”.

During the summer, the commander of Iran’s elite Quds force, Gen. Qasem Soleimani, traveled to Moscow. Several senior Guard commanders have been killed in Syria.

The USA military has confirmed that a few rebel groups have surrendered their weapons when confronted by extremists.

Kweires has been besieged by Islamic State fighters.