As many as four of the 26 long-range cruise missiles that Russian Federation said it fired at Syrian targets landed instead in Iran.
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The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the 20 explosions killed 14 IS fighters and wounded more than 20. IS-affiliated accounts on Twitter also announced the militants had seized those villages.
ISIL fighters killed Brigadier General Hossein Hamedani overnight, Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) – the elite branch of the Iranian army, said in a statement carried by its official media outlet on Friday.
“Daesh has exploited the Russian air strikes and the preoccupation of the (rebel) Free Syrian Army in its battles in Hama, and advanced in Aleppo”, said one rebel commander with fighters in the region, using an Arabic name for IS. Hamedani was a veteran of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war and was made deputy chief commander in 2005. And the Russian airstrikes have been also been backing Syrian government ground combat in Syria.
Guard commanders repeatedly have said Iran only has high-level advisers in Syria, denying it has fighters there.
But the decision to abandon the rebel training program, which has for the past two years been a central tenet of the administration’s strategy against ISIL, suggests disarray in the White House’s overall posture toward the war in Syria that has killed at least 250,000 people and spawned a refugee crisis from the Mideast to Western Europe. It said the militants seized the villages of Tal Qrah, Tal Sousin and Kfar Qares north of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and its onetime commercial capital. Hamedani was also reportedly in charge of organizing and commanding the various Iranian-backed Shiite militias fighting alongside President Bashar Assad’s forces.
Carter cited the work U.S. trainers have done with Kurds in northern Syria as an example of how the training may be focused in the future.
The Anadolu Agency said Friday that Leyla, 27, died in the attack in the town of Hreitan, in northern Aleppo province, late Thursday. US officials say that effort is having more success with its goals than the one run by the military, which only trained militants willing to promise to take on the Islamic State exclusively. It said the group opened its blitz with a surprise attack on the Infantry Academy, forcing rebels positioned there to withdraw after a number of their fighters were killed or captured. The United States and its allies have been waging a year-long air campaign against Islamic State in Syria, while pushing to diplomatically edge Assad from power.
North Atlantic Treaty Organisation talked tough Thursday about Moscow’s expanding military activity in Syria, but the U.S.-led alliance’s main response to the Russian airstrikes and cruise missile attacks was a public pledge to help reinforce the defenses of member nation Turkey if necessary.
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The meeting was dominated by concerns about Russia’s military actions in Syria.
