(Combines Davutoglu, ministry, spokesman) ISTANBUL, October 7 (Reuters) – Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said on Wednesday that Russian air strikes in Syria were weakening the fight against Islamic State and warned that Turkey would not compromise on border security after Russian warplanes violated its air space.
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In Moscow, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said Russia is using warships in the Caspian Sea to target the Islamic State group in Syria.
Davis said this highlights the Pentagon’s interest in talking further to Russian officials about ways to avoid accidents and potential unintended conflict in the skies over Syria. But the US and France say at least a few of the strikes appear to have hit Western-backed rebel factions fighting government troops, with the real goal of protecting Assad.
U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter’s critique amounted to a rebuff of Russian Federation, which had sought greater coordination as Moscow escalates its military role in support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Shoigu insisted the operation destroyed all the targets and did not launch any strikes on civilian areas.
The U.S.-led coalition has been routinely conducting airstrikes on Islamic State militants in Syria.
Syrian state media made no mention of the coordinated attacks, saying instead that Russian aircraft had targeted Islamic State positions in the Aleppo countryside, where its fighters hold territory.
Carter said Russia’s military campaign in Syria “a very wrongheaded and backward approach that’s sure to backfire”, and that reports it will send in “volunteer” ground troops would only deepen their mistake.
In an apparent spillover from the fighting in Syria, Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency says militants fired a shell at a Lebanese army position near the two countries’ shared border, wounding five Lebanese soldiers.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said a government offensive began early Wednesday on four fronts in Idlib and neighboring Hama provinces in what the group’s director Rami Abdurrahman called “the most intense fighting in months”. Meanwhile, the Turkish military has said its fighter jets were harassed by a MIG-29 plane from an unidentified country close to Syria on Sunday and Monday. Jamil al-Saleh, said the offensive, accompanied by air cover and shelling, came from three fronts, including Latamneh, north of the Hama province where his group is based, and Kfar Zeita to the north. The offensive targets the rural part of northern Hama and Idlib, the northwestern province, nearly totally controlled by rebel groups, he said.
He said only two out of 57 Russian strikes had hit the jihadist group.
Russian Federation has carried out dozens of strikes in Syria since launching its air campaign last Wednesday.
He said Russian and US experts were expected to discuss technical details on Wednesday.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin says French President Francois Hollande last week suggested that government forces in Syria form an alliance with the opposition’s Free Syrian Army. The US maintains that the only route to peace in Syria is to remove Assad from power. Although the missile system had been seen as a potential threat to Western European targets, the evidence it has an effective range of more than 900 miles surprised analysts of Russian military hardware.
