Russian planes make 33 sorties, hit 49 targets in Syria – Ifax

Galuzin said Russian Federation has also presented video and other data showing the successful elimination of dozens of “facilities of ISIS and other terrorists”, referring to the Islamic State by a common acronym.

Russian Federation began air strikes against militant groups in Syria on September 30.

Moscow has been launching air strikes in the area in addition to various other regions of the country.

Xinhua news agency, quoting a local military source, reported the Syrian military is closing in on a power plant and air base in the area.

Russian commanders are now looking to create “a single base that would include sea, air and land components”, said Colonel-General Andrei Kartapolov in an interview with the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper published Friday.

His speech at the United Nations last month, which heralded the more muscular Russian policy, qualified him as the “new sheriff in town” and his country as the “real powerbroker in the Middle East,”according to conservative national security analyst John Schindler”.

Among them were two underground bunkers, used by jihadis to skulk underground to get away from air strikes.

Russia’s successes on the Syrian battlefield seem to have come as a surprise for those, who thought Russian Armed Forces were stuck in the 1990s.

Turkey and the West, for their part, accuse Russian Federation of targeting moderate groups in Syria opposed to Assad, many of which are supported by Ankara and Washington.

We remember that in 2008, during the war in South Ossetia, although the Russian forces had managed to repel the Georgian attack, they had above all shown the world the deplorable state of their equipment.

In this sense, Putin’s intervention in Syria is no different from his intervention in Ukraine – just substitute the Arab Spring for the Euromaidan, Islamic fundamentalists for Ukrainian fascists, and the beleaguered semi-state of Bashar al-Assad for the declared semi-state of the Donetsk People’s Republic.

Russia announced that it was intervening in Syria at the request of the Syrian government, but that was a foregone conclusion once Russian troops and weaponry started arriving in Syria, even though initially Russia declared they were there only for “training purposes”. But he notes that ISIS has lots of members from the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and that they felt humiliated when Hussein’s ouster by the US -led coalition.

Opposition forces, including Free Syrian Army combatants, were also busy fighting Daesh in the northern part of Aleppo.

“That is the basis we are working on”, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said. Russian military operations are a reality with which the Western forces have to contend. There have already been a few close calls between USA and Russian aircraft over Syria.

“When I hear people offering up half-baked ideas as if they are solutions, or trying to downplay the challenges involved in this situation… what I’d like to see people ask is, ‘specifically, precisely, what exactly would you do, and how would you fund it, and how would you sustain it?'” Obama said. “They need dozens”, said one of the officials.