On Monday, Russian media reported that Moscow has once again requested Iran and Iraq to allow cruise missiles to fly through their respective airspace to deliver strikes on terrorist targets in Syria.
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Both countries are staunch allies of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and the flights marked the first time Russian Federation has launched strikes from Iranian territory.
The ministry said a “considerable number” of militants were killed in airstrikes which targeted five arms depots, training facilities and three command centres of militant groups.
Iran has long banned foreign militaries from establishing bases on its soil.
On Tuesday, Aug. 16, Secretary of Supreme National Security Council of Iran, Ali Shamkhani, confirmed in an interview with IRNA that Tehran provided infrastructure to Moscow to combat ISIL terrorists from the territory of Iran.
The Russian defence minister said all proposals for joint efforts were aimed at preserving Syria’s territorial integrity, defeating terrorism and settling issues at the negotiating table.
The United Nations remained deeply concerned over the plight of up to 2 million people in need of assistance across Aleppo city and for those in the surrounding countryside in Syria, a UN spokesman said here Monday.
Strikes in the Tariq al-Bab and al-Sakhour districts of northeast Aleppo had killed around 20 people, while air raids in a corridor rebels opened this month into opposition-held eastern parts of the city had killed another nine, the observatory said.
Su-30cm and Su-35s fighters, based in Hmeimim air base in Syria, provided cover for the mission, the statement said.
As it became known earlier, Russian Aerospace Forces made a decision to use Hamadan airbase in Iran to carry out military actions.
A senior Syrian opposition official says the latest Russian airstrikes in Syria, with warplanes taking off from Iran, aims to show Moscow internationally as “a power with teeth”.
Aleppo, Syria’s former economic hub and a focal point of its 5-year civil war, has been divided between a rebel-held east and regime-controlled west since mid-2012. Moscow’s alliance with Iran might also allow Russian Federation to make further inroads into both of those countries.
Russian Federation backs the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, in the five-year-old Syria conflict, while the United States wants to see Assad step down.
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Russian Federation and Iran have been expanding their ties in the past months after most of the sanctions against Iran were lifted.
