Syrian regime forces retaliate after airstrikes

According to Reuters, U.S. State Department spokesperson John Kirby said he couldn’t confirm CNN’s report, while Iran’s Defense Ministry told RIA Novosti they had “no information of Russian missiles crashing on Iranian territory”.

Russian Federation has rejected USA claims that four of its missiles crashed into Iran rather than reaching intended targets in Syria.

Newspapers in Syria and its ally Iran are naturally delighted, since Russia’s avowed target is the militant group Islamic State (IS).

Hundreds of Iranian troops have arrived in Syria to join a major ground offensive on behalf of President Bashar al-Assad’s government, Lebanese sources said last Thursday, a further step in the rapid internationalisation of a civil war in which every major country in the region has a stake.

“Today, the Syrian Arab armed forces began a wide-ranging attack with the aim of eliminating the terrorist groups and liberating the areas and towns that suffered from their scourge and crimes”, Ayoub said in rare televised remarks.

Russia’s involvement in Syria, which began with air strikes September 30 and escalated Wednesday with cruise missiles, “raises serious concerns”, North Atlantic Treaty Organisation Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said after a meeting of the alliance’s defense ministers in Brussels.

Despite fears of clashes between Russian and coalition aircraft over Syria, he said he was committed to building parliamentary support for RAF strikes against IS.

Meanwhile, Turkish papers are unhappy with Russian incursions into their airspace, with HaberTurk quoting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as saying: “I will not call Putin again”.

Moscow launched the attack from warships stationed in the Caspian Sea. Asked how long the coalition would be in place and whether it would be maintained until the end of both the Assad regime and the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, the senator gave no timeline.

Other officials said intelligence agencies are attempting to ramp up their spying efforts on Russian Federation but do not have adequate resources due to much of it being allocated to counterterrorism efforts in the Middle East. For example, initially the Russian Navy claimed e deployment of elements of the Black Sea fleet to the Eastern Mediterranean had nothing to do with the Syrian conflict, when in fact the ships were sortied to create an air defense bubble around Russian forces in eastern Syria. And the Russian airstrikes have been also been backing Syrian government ground combat in Syria.

“To the dismay of our friends in the Pentagon and Langley, our strike yesterday with precision-guided weapons at ISIS infrastructure in Syria hit its targets”, the statement read.