On Friday, two U.S. F-22 Raptors responded to two Syrian Su-24 Fencers that approached the city of Hassakeh, where USA forces have been on the ground training Syrian Kurdish and Arab forces fighting the Islamic State group.
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“It’s not a ‘no fly zone, ‘ ” he added.
“We would continue to advise the Syrian regime to steer clear of those areas”, Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook told reporters.
US Secretary of State John Kerry on Monday said he hoped it was “very possible, even likely” he would hold talks on Syria with Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov.
On Thursday, US fighter jets were sent to intercept Syrian government warplanes that were bombing the position of Kurdish militia in the northeastern Syrian town of El-Hasakah, close to where US special forces are operating. That message was also relayed to Syria through regime-allied Russia, Cook said.
Be Civil – It’s OK to have a difference in opinion but there’s no need to be a jerk.
“We’ve said repeatedly that we would defend coalition forces on the ground, for one, and we would continue to defend our partnered operations”, he said.
“We are going to tell the Syrians and anyone else who may threaten our force in that are that we will defend then and they have a right to defend themselves as well”, Cook said. That incident followed one on Thursday when two USA aircraft responded to Syrian jets conducting airstrikes around Hassakeh.
“We will continue to support our coalition forces and our partnered operations on the ground in Syria”, Cook said. We are not there yet”, Cook said, and recent actions by the Russians and the Syrians “only make it harder.
In practice, the move is a dramatic escalation, and Cook’s arguing of semantics didn’t mean much of anything, as he spent the rest of the press briefing railing against the Syrian military for contesting control of Aleppo with al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front, and insisted that the Kurds would continue to enjoy U.S. military support in the fighting.
“We did engage through our “Memorandum of understanding” with the Russians, specifically after that instance, to have them communicate to the Syrian regime our concerns about what had happened and the fact that it shouldn’t happen again”, Cook said Monday.
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He added that “there are limitations to where we’re going [with this air support] because our forces are not everywhere in Syria”.
