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Pentagon officials say the Kremlin may be planning to turn the airfield near Latakia into a major hub that could be used not only to funnel military supplies to Assad but to give Moscow a bigger military foothold in the Middle East, The New York Times reports.

Mr Kerry’s call came shortly after Russian President Vladimir Putin defended his military assistance to Assad’s government and said it was impossible to defeat Isil without co-operating with Damascus.

Pakistani authorities on Saturday arrested 28 suspects, including eight Afghans, a day after the deadly Taliban attack on an air force base near here that killed 42 people.

Taliban gunmen have stormed a Pakistani air force base, killing at least 17 people, most of whom were offering prayers in a mosque, the deadliest such attack in years.

“The secretary and the minister talked about areas where the United States and Russia’s perspectives overlap and areas of divergence”, Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook said.

The assault shows the Taliban retain the capability to mount devastating attacks despite a military campaign and a government crackdown against them following the massacre of more than 150 people, mostly children, at an army-run school last December. In this particular case,...

The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack but said the militants allowed women and children to leave the area safely.

United States officials said in recent days that they are seeking answers to myriad questions about the precise reasoning behind Moscow’s recent deliveries of material and manpower to a base in northern Syria.

The Pakistani Taliban launched a brazen assault on a military base on the outskirts of the north-western city of Peshawar early Friday, storming a mosque inside the sprawling compound and killing 16 worshippers during prayers.

Nevertheless, Russian officials have played down the deliveries of military hardware to Syria, the newspaper added.

Asked Wednesday if Russia plans to create a base in Syria, Gen. Nikolai Bogdanovsky, a deputy chief of the General Staff of the Russian military, said, according to Russian news agencies, that “there are no such plans as of today, but anything may happen”.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday that Moscow will continue supporting the Syrian government with military and technical aid in its fight against terrorists such as the Islamic State.

“There is now no Iranian initiative, but rather there are ideas, or principles, for an Iranian initiative which are based principally on the subject of Syria’s sovereignty… and are based on fighting terrorism“, Assad said.

Security forces had launched a ground offensive against the militants in Shawal last week. “An officer, Lieutenant Colonel Faisal Malik and a soldier also embraced shahadat”, the military said in a statement.

At least four army personnel were martyred and as many injured when a rocket fired from the Afghanistan side landed on a check-post in Khyber Agency, the media wing of Pakistan military said.