As Islamic State militants advance to Aleppo, the White House will resume talks with Russian Federation in a bid to avoid accidents in Syria. “Progress was made during the talks, and the US agreed to another discussion with Russian Federation in the near future”.
Russia, a top ally of President Bashar al-Assad, started bombing in Syria on September 30 saying it was targeting Islamic State and other opposition groups, a campaign that has drawn Moscow deeper into Syria’s more than four-year-old conflict.
“The discussions were professional and focused narrowly on the implementation of specific safety procedures”, the U.S. Department of Defense said in a statement released on Saturday.
Syrian government troops have retaken a strategic town from Islamist rebels with the assistance of Russian airstrikes in the central province of Hama, a group that monitors Syrian conflict said.
Elsewhere in Aleppo province, the Observatory said a powerful blast ripped through an explosives factory and weapons deport in the IS-held town of Al-Bab. Fighters from the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and Islamic military groups joined forces with ISIS to help saturate large swaths of Syria and Iraq for the borderless caliphate.
In Aleppo province to the north, rebels battled to reverse an advance by the Islamic State group that brought the jihadists to within a few kilometres (miles) of Syria’s second city.
A senior figure in the Revolutionary Guards, Brig-Gen Hamedani was killed in Aleppo province, where he was advising the Syrian military, news reports said.
A total of 63 air strikes destroyed 53 fortified positions in Syria’s Hama, Lattakia, Idlib and Raqqa provinces, the defence ministry said.
A regular commentator on how the media operates in Russian Federation, Yakovenko said the Kremlin had successfully used Syria, like other episodes before it, to fuel its preferred domestic narrative of Putin as the leader of the modern world.
Although Iran has stated that it will continue to battle ISIS forces just as the United States does, it should be noted that the Iranian government is pro-Assad, while the United States is in a coalition with radicals who are on a mission to take down Assad from his reign.
Syrian rebels and their backers say Hama, Idlib and Latakia have little or no ISIS presence and accuse Russian Federation of targeting moderate and Islamist opposition fighters more than the jihadist group.
Meanwhile, in spite of Putin’s brash and bullying tactics (tactics evidently much admired by American hardliners), it is not in America’s interests to get into a proxy war with Russian Federation in Syria.
“One sign of how constrained the capabilities of these groups are is that their threats to stage attacks during the Sochi Olympic Games essentially failed to materialize”, said Saradzhyan, an expert on post-Soviet states.
With Russia’s planes in Syrian airspace and its advisors surrounding Assad, any remaining Western hopes of toppling his regime are effectively over for the time being. Speaking in Turkey where he was holed up to escape the Nusra Front, al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria, he showed how the program’s inability to meet desired ends lies in not training enough rebels to be effective on the battlefield.
