As Islamic State militants advance to Aleppo, the White House will resume talks with Russian Federation in a bid to avoid accidents in Syria.
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Both countries have been conducting air strikes against Islamic State targets, but the campaigns are uncoordinated.
“The discussions were professional and focused narrowly on the implementation of specific safety procedures”, a spokeswoman said, adding that another discussion would take place in the near future.
“In 64 sorties in the past 24 hours, the Russian air force hit 55 ISIS targets in Syria”, the defence ministry said in a statement on Saturday.
Russia’s defence ministry declined to comment and the US State Department said it could not confirm the reports.
Syrian government forces captured a village from rebels in the central province of Hama Saturday as they pressed a ground operation backed by Russian air support.
In Aleppo province, Islamist rebels including the powerful Ahrar al-Sham group recaptured one of several villages seized by ISIS in a Friday advance, the Observatory said. Turkey’s interim deputy prime minister, Numan Kurtulmas, said in an interview with state-run Anadolu Agency published on Friday that foreign forces should stop playing “war games” in Syria, where a new exodus of refugees could be triggered.
On September 30, Russian Federation started to carry out the airstrikes against positions of the extremist group Islamic State (IS) in Syria, a move that had been criticized by the U.S.to be mainly aiming at striking Syria’s anti-government rebels.
Dmitri Peskov, Russian presidential spokesman, referring to the successful firing of 26 cruise missiles type Kalibr 7 October from a distance of 500 thousand kilometers by four ships of the Caspian Flotilla 11 strategic targets against ISIL, said it confirmed the achievement of a new technical quality.
Aside from the general’s death being a “psychological blow to the pro-regime forces in Syria”, according to Gerecht, analyst Andrew Tabler of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy also said the top commander’s killing is an obvious reflection of how much the Iranian government is really involved in the Syrian war. However, there were other militants in northern Syria, such as Chechens, that Russian Federation might want to take out.
Two noteworthy events have occurred in respect of Syria in recent days that are likely to have a wider echo in Russia-America relations, and impact not just the political dynamics in West Asia but also in Europe.
Islamic State’s push in Aleppo threatens a main road used by rival jihadist rebels for access to the Turkish border.
Calling Russia a proud, important country, Juncker said more normal European Union relations with the Russian government nonetheless require a “massive” change of behavior by the Kremlin after its annexation of Crimea and support for rebels in eastern Ukraine.
The terror group’s advance came on the same day as it emerged that the United States was to scrap a $500m programme to train and equip moderate rebels willing to fight Isis, highlighting the lack of a western strategy towards the conflict in Syria, now in its fifth year, and which has seen more than a quarter of a million people killed.
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In a message of condolence, President Hassan Rouhani praised Brig-Gen Hamedani as a “martyr” and said his death was a “big loss”.
