After ISIS claimed responsibility for the attacks in Paris that killed at least 129 people, there have been calls for stronger action in Syria.
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With nerves jangling across Europe, German police arrested and then released seven people around Aachen, near the Belgian border, and later canceled a Germany-Netherlands soccer match in Hanover, evacuating the stadium shortly before kick-off.
Both the French and Russian forces are now striking at targets within Syria – and today, Tass says Russia’s pilots have been told to hunt down and destroy tanker trucks that ISIS is using to move crude oil and petroleum products as part of its finance operation. “It must be intensified in such a way that the criminals understand that retribution is inevitable”.
The Russian military has destroyed numerous oil facilities and tankers controlled by the Islamic State group in Syria, sharply cutting its income, Russia’s defence minister said.
Since Friday’s attacks in Paris, Hollande has stepped up French air raids against the IS stronghold of Raqqa in Syria and vowed to wage a “merciless” war against the organisation, urging others to follow suit.
President François Hollande will travel to Washington and Moscow toward the end of November as the French leader seeks to build a single coalition. Putin ordered the Russian navy in the eastern Mediterranean to coordinate its actions on the sea and in the air with the French navy, after the Kremlin used longrange bombers and cruise missiles in Syria and announced it would expand its strike force by 37 planes. “With the arrival of the Charles de Gaulle warship to the Syrian shore we will organize joint military operations”.
More French airstrikes, reaching 25 to 30, struck Raqqa late Tuesday, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group in Britain that has a network of contacts in Syria. “The acts committed on Friday in Paris are acts of war”.
North Atlantic Treaty Organisation said it was providing support to France but had not triggered article five.
“There is major fear in the city, especially with Daesh preventing civilians from leaving the city”, Khaled said, using the Arabic acronym for the group.
Neutral Ireland was one of several smaller European Union countries that expressed a willingness to send more peacekeepers to Mali. And while strikes are sometimes reported to have hit Islamic State military bases, Shadi said such strikes may sound more significant than they really were, because the bases are large and open and can be hit without doing any real damage.
Prime Minister David Cameron said he is going to present a plan to Parliament on tackling IS, which would include extending airstrikes to Syria.
The president met visiting U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday morning to press his call for separate U.S.-led and Russian-led coalitions in Syria to combine forces and give priority to fighting Islamic State. British war planes have been bombing the militants in Iraq, but not Syria.
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“Raqqa, if you like, is the head of the snake”.
