The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that government troops, backed by fighters from the allied Lebanese Hezbollah movement and military experts from Iran, were attacking the rebel-controlled areas in the southern part of Aleppo.
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Aleppo, Syria’s second biggest city, has been split between rebel control in the east and regime control in the west since shortly after fighting began there in mid-2012.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, sensing weakness in President Barack Obama’s response to his country’s military moves in Syria, escalated his anti-American rhetoric this week by saying Obama’s Syria policy is weak and lacks objectives leaving Russia free to increase bombing of rebel strongholds in support of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad.
A U.S. official said “terrorists” considered the drone was of Russian origin, but Russia says that all their drones that had broken Turkish airspace and are accounted for.
Turkey earlier this month had complained about Russian warplanes violating its airspace, intrusions that also drew strong condemnation from Turkey’s North Atlantic Treaty Organisation allies.
All planes in Russia’s air group in Syria returned to base after their missions, while “unmanned aircraft conducting monitoring of the situation in Syria and conducting aerial reconnaissance are functioning normally”, Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said Friday, according to the RIA Novosti news service.
Dozens of sorties and hundreds of air strikes on ISIS and rebel targets in Syria has dealt a severe blow to the once-mighty terror network, which once boasted swaths of territory across Iraq and northern Syria.
Turkey has also reported numerous incidents of harassment of its F-16 jets patrolling the Syrian border, by Syrian fighter planes or Syria-based surface-to-air missile systems locking radar on them.
The Russian air force and its Israeli counterpart has started a joint training exercise in order to “ensure aviation safety in Syrian airspace”, the defence ministry in Moscow has revealed.
The Syrian conflict has displaced millions and left more than 250,000 people dead since it erupted in 2011, following a government crackdown on people protesting President Assad’s regime.
There is not much the US can do to prevent Russian Federation from targeting rebel groups it has armed in Aleppo.
“The aircraft, whose nationality could not be established, was downed by patrolling Turkish jets in accordance with engagement rules after it failed to heed three warnings”, the Turkish General Staff said in a statement issued on its website.
Russian warplanes and Syrian army artillery units pounded rebel positions in the hours preceding the operation in what has become a bellwether of army ground offensives in recent weeks.
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“Let me just state unequivocally we’ve seen no evidence to indicate that those reports are true”, press secretary Josh Earnest said Thursday.
