Turkish PM says drone downed last week was Russian-made

Meanwhile, the Observatory and monitoring group Local Coordination Committees said intense clashes were reported on the edges of Wadihi, a village the government firmly controlled Sunday, a day after entering it during an offensive in southern Aleppo.

“We can’t allow them to use the experience they have just gained in Syria back home”, he said. Foreign states supporting the rebels include Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar.

Russian Federation insists it is targeting IS and other groups it deems “terrorist” but the United States and its allies say it is mainly hitting more moderate rebels battling Assad.

“A few (TOW missiles) will not do the trick”. Should Aleppo and other Sunni towns fall to Assad’s forces, the potential for another, larger, wave of refugees would be nightmarish, according to one official in a European government. “We are well-stocked after these deliveries”.

Since Syrian forces began ground operations in tandem with Russian air strikes on October 7, their focus has appeared to be a stretch of highway between Aleppo and Homs.

Since Russian airstrikes began on September 30, Syrian troops have been on the offensive on several fronts around the country, in an attempt to secure supply routes and regain control of strategic areas.

As his troops head toward Aleppo, Syria’s former commercial hub and largest city, helicopters are dropping warnings to residents to vacate areas. The army and its allies have captured several villages.

Commander of the Nour al-Din al- Zinki outfit, Nasif Ismail, lost his life in the southern part of the province, located 355 kilometers (220 miles) north of the capital, Damascus, on Monday as Syrian troopers, backed by Russian air force, mounted a large-scale ground offensive to wrest control of the militant-held territory.

He said that over the previous 24 hours, 17 rebels and eight pro-regime fighters had been killed.

Local Coordination Committees said government warplanes had bombed areas in eastern Aleppo near the Kweiras military air base, which the IS group has besieged for months.

“Even if there isn’t a radical improvement in the regime’s military fortunes, which is unlikely, at the very least the aim is to consolidate its military and territorial positions to remove the question of Assad’s departure as a precondition for a political settlement”, Mikhail Barabanov, a senior researcher at the Moscow-based Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, told Bloomberg. “We had a shortfall in TOW and the regime APCs were able to move”.

They also believe that if Putin succeeds in fight against terrorists, then his image will be significantly improved against the background of the virtually futile air strikes, which the coalition forces led by Washington have been conducting over the past years.