The U.S. is spearheading a rival coalition that is bombing Islamic State targets in Syria, sparking fears that jets from the two sides could clash.
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Ash Carter, the U.S. defense secretary, said the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, had wrapped his country in a “shroud of isolation” which only a drastic change in policy could reverse.
“We have not for our part, and will not, agree to cooperate with Russian Federation so long as they continue to pursue this misguided strategy”, Carter said.
Colonel Steve Warren, the spokesman for the US-led coalition, told reporters that coalition and Russian planes came just “miles apart” over Syria. “All pilots conducted themselves appropriately and everyone went about their business…”
“But this is – but it is risky, right?” he said at a briefing in Baghdad on Tuesday. “There’s always going to be a few risk if there are uncoordinated actors in the battle space”.
Those actions are of “great concern” to the United States, and are a main reason why the current military discussions with Russian Federation are narrowly focused on aerial operations as opposed to broader military discussions, one of the officials said.
Isil and other insurgents, including groups backed by Assad’s foreign enemies, have been fighting each other north of the city in an area of territory where Turkey and the United States have been laying plans to crush Isil, which controls large swathes of Syria and Iraq.
Meanwhile, a spokesperson of the Russian foreign ministry said that Russian fighter jets destroyed a building in Aleppo from where ISIS militants prepared to carry out suicide attacks and rigged vehicles with explosives.
Saturday’s incident was the latest in a series of aerial encounters between the two countries since Russian Federation launched airstrikes late last month to prop up Syrian President Bashar al Assad in the ongoing civil war.
The regime launched heavy attacks including air raids on Wednesday in a bid to dislodge insurgents entrenched on the outskirts of the capital, a military source told AFP.
The Russian embassy in Damascus came under mortar shelling on Tuesday morning. Retaking Aleppo is considered critical to the Assad regime and thought to be all but impossible without the recent arrival of Russian air power. There were no reports of dead or wounded.
The alliance also includes various Arab groups including Jaysh al-Thuwwar (Army of Rebels) and the Arab tribal Jaysh al-Sanadeed, as well as an Assyrian Christian group named the Syriac Military Council (MFS) that is now fighting ISIS in northern Syria, according to the statement obtained by Reuters that announced the coalition’s establishment.
The Central Intelligence Agency effort, which has trained and funded as many as 10,000 Syrian rebels over the last two years, is separate from the failed Defense Department training program that the Pentagon ended last week.
Rebels say they have plentiful supplies of US-made anti-tank missiles that are helping them to hold off ground attacks.
The “Islamic State” (IS, also known as ISIS, ISIL, Daesh) appears to be gaining, not losing ground as a result of Russia’s operations, and there is a chance of even greater escalation and involvement in the conflict by Iran and Saudi Arabia, as well as the United States, France and the UK, he added.
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“Turkey can not accept any cooperation with terrorist organizations which have waged war against it”, he said.
