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Islamic State shoots down Syrian warplane

“The situation in Syria is worsening”, said Russian General Vladimir Savchenko in a briefing.

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The ceasefire has so far lasted five days.

Syria’s state news agency SANA says insurgents have violated the cease-fire 12 times in the last 12 hours.

General Viktor Poznikhir said: “Our repeated messages to the American side are left without a response”.

She went on to say, “Russia really needs to stop the cheap point scoring and the grandstanding and the stunts and focus on what matters, which is implementation of something we negotiated in good faith with them”.

Russian Federation has also confirmed that a Daesh offensive began right after Syrian Army positions were hit from the air.

US -led coalition jets bombed a Syrian army position at Jebel Tharda near Deir al-Zor airport on Saturday, killing at least 80 Syrian soldiers according to credible sources, paving the way for Islamic State to briefly overrun the area. The unnamed spokesman said the IS advance on the base was stopped after Russian warplanes were called in to hit IS positions.

It said the raid was carried out at 5:00pm local time and led to an unspecified number of “casualties”.

It said earlier that only 30 soldiers had been killed, citing the same source.

The catastrophic blunder is believed to have killed up to 80 Syrian troops, with the USA military saying coalition jets mistakenly believed they were targeting ISIS positions.

Russian Federation has been anxious for the coordination to begin, and on Saturday, quickly saw a propaganda advantage in the Deir al-Zour strike.

The strike and circumstances surrounding it will be reviewed it said, “to see if any lessons can be learned”.

A US-led coalition fighting jihadists in Syria admitted it may have hit an army position in the east Saturday, in strikes that Russian Federation and a monitor said killed at least 62 soldiers.

“If this airstrike was carried out due to an error in the coordinates of the target, it is a direct effect of (the) United States side’s unwillingness to coordinate its actions against terrorist groups with Russia”, Sputnik quoted the spokesman as saying.

Syria’s army has been fighting off a fierce offensive by the Islamic State jihadist group on the Deir Ezzor military airport since a year ago.

A US-led air attack in eastern Syria that killed dozens of government troops fighting so-called Islamic State has endangered an already shaky ceasefire deal, Russian Federation says.

“However, shortly after the bombing commenced, Russian officials advised the Combined Air Operations Centre that the targets may have been Syrian military personnel”.

Zakharova was quoted by the state news agency Tass as saying that “after today’s attack on the Syrian army, we come to the bad conclusion that the White House is defending the Islamic State”.

“Again, we call on Washington to put pressure on the US-controlled militants to ensure that they respect the ceasefire conditions”. If confirmed, it would be the first American strike on President Bashar Assad’s forces in the five-year-old conflict.

“I would be very interested to see how Washington is going to react”.

The airstrikes come as Russian Federation accuses the United States of failing to control rebel groups tied to “terrorist elements,” in particular the Fatah al-Sham Front, previously known as al-Nusra Front, which was aligned with al-Qaeda.

Earlier on Saturday, Russian President Vladimir Putin questioned the USA commitment to cease-fire, suggesting that Washington wasn’t prepared to break with “terrorist elements” battling Assad’s forces.

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The Syrian government says insurgents have been firing on routes leading into the northern city of Aleppo, endangering United Nations efforts to deliver aid to besieged, rebel-held neighborhoods.

Russian President Vladimir Putin right and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov speak each other at a CIS summit in Bishkek Kyrgyzstan Saturday Sept. 17 2016. (Mikhail Klimentyev  Sputni