Air strikes on the northern Syrian city of Raqqa and its outskirts over the past three days have killed at least 33 fighters with the Islamic State group, activists say.
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Russian Federation has maintained a fleet of fighter aircraft at a base in Latakia, Syria, for months, and conducted daily airstrikes in Syria from that base.
It is the city that the US-led coalition bombs when they need a symbolic victory, when they need to show the world that they mean business… actual Islamic State militants being the target or not.
Raqqa has also been targeted by Russian bombers as part of Vladimir Putin’s campaign against the terror group in Syria. Activists reported 15 explosions overnight on Tuesday, though they said the city was also struck by an unidentified ballistic missile.
Police released more information about the movements of a few of the suspects and how they managed to put together their plot under the nose of authorities.
“It is in Syria, in Raqqa, that ISIL has its headquarters and it is from Raqqa that a few of the main threat against this country are planned and orchestrated”, Cameron said, referring to Islamic State by one of its many acronyms.
“It’s not the right moment to judge who is better and who is worse”, Putin said.
“In the aftermath of the Paris attacks – Putin saw a few opportunity for propaganda strikes so that is what he did”, said retired Navy Cmdr.
Prime Minister Manuel Valls said Mr Hollande would travel to Washington and Moscow next week to press his case for a single alliance to combat Islamic State instead of the current situation where Russian Federation is supporting the forces of President Bashar al-Assad in conjunction with Iran, while the United States and France are in a coalition with Sunni Arab states opposed to Mr Assad.
From a base in southern Russia, warplanes including 25 Backfire, Bear and Blackjack bombers dropped air-launched cruise missiles against more than a dozen Islamic State targets over night in what represents a major escalation of Russian military involvement in Syria.
In a sign of an emerging Russia-West axis, French President Francois Hollande announced he would travel to Washington next week and Moscow two days later to discuss stepping up cooperation against IS with Obama and Putin.
If the French are indeed thinking in their traditional “way of war”, perhaps they will offer answers; we can all hope such an effort could be successful without the costs entailed in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the costs of such lack of foresight are still being paid. “And we will see greater coordination in this effort”.
The IS has claimed responsibility for a coordinated onslaught in Paris on Friday and the downing of a Russian charter jet over Sinai on Oct 31, saying they were in retaliation for French and Russian air raids in Iraq and Syria. British war planes have been bombing the militants in Iraq, but not Syria.
According to our counterterrorism sources, Russian intelligence chiefs are convinced that certain top Egyptian military and security service officers know exactly who was responsible.
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Late on Tuesday, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said a Paris-bound Air France flight from Los Angeles had landed in Salt Lake City, where the passengers and crew were transferred to the terminal. This is what the United States is actually demanding – and selling billions of dollars worth of weapons to the fundamentalist Sunni Saudi government in order to use not only in Syria but in Yemen to slaughter Shiites in those countries.
