Britain has conducted its first air strikes on Syria, according to a Government source.
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Britain joined U.S.-led air strikes against Islamic State in Syria on Thursday, but Vladimir Putin issued bitter new denunciations of Turkey for shooting down a Russian plane, demonstrating the limits to worldwide solidarity.
The British Defense Ministry said four Tornado fighter jets left the Akrotiri Royal Air Force Base in Cyprus, carried out their missile raid, and returned without incident.
No more details were immediately available.
MPs overwhelmingly backed United Kingdom military action against IS – also known as Daesh – in Syria, by 397 votes to 223, after a 10-hour Commons debate on Wednesday.
RAF Akrotiri has been used as a launchpad for attacks on Islamic State targets in Iraq for just over a year, and late on Wednesday Britain’s parliament broadened its scope for targets within Syria.
Several senior Labour figures also opposed Corbyn, including shadow foreign secretary Hilary Benn, who told assembled politicians “The time has come for us to fight this evil”.
Following the RAF’s first strikes against ISIS overnight, British Prime Minster David Cameron believes patience and persistence will be needed against the extremists in Syria. “Of the precision strike aircraft available to the coalition, the British Tornados make up about a third and we have about a quarter of the unmanned aircraft”.
Although the British vote adds negligible new military capability to the coalition, it took on outsized political and diplomatic significance since gunmen and bombers killed 130 people last month in Paris. The RAF has been launching airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq since 2014.
They will be joined by six Typhoon jets, which took off from RAF Lossiemouth in Scotland shortly after 0800 GMT, and two more Tornado fighters, which were due to take off from RAF Marham in southeast England.
President Barack Obama also welcomed the decision, saying Islamic State is a “global threat that must be defeated by a global response”.
Mr Fallon said the vote had “freed the RAF up” to attack targets on the Syrian side of the border, as well as in Iraq, where the United Kingdom has been taking part in coalition bombing missions for over a year.
But he was forced to fend off calls to apologize, including from opposition Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, after reportedly telling fellow Conservative MPs at a private meeting not to vote with “a bunch of terrorist sympathizers” against the strikes.
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Opponents argued that Britain’s entry into Syria’s crowded airspace would make little difference and said Mr.Cameron’s military plan was based on wishful thinking that overlooked the messy reality of the Syrian civil war. On Friday German lawmakers vote on a proposed commitment of up to 1,200 troops and additional support for the air campaign.
