United States intelligence fears that as many as 30,000 foreign fighters have travelled to Iraq and Syria since 2011, many of them to join the Islamic State (IS) group.
Advertisement
Announcing the airstrikes, Hollande’s office said in a statement Sunday: “Our country thus confirms its resolute commitment to fight against the terrorist threat represented by Daesh (the Arabic acronym for ISIL)”.
“We continue to encourage ISF (Iraqi security forces) leaders to move as quickly as possible to prevent giving ISIL time and space to regroup and resupply”, Ryder said, using an acronym for Islamic State.
Despite support from USA forces and continuous air strikes, which started when the city of Mosul in Iraq was lost, ISIS still maintains control over a large amount of territory in Iraq and Syria.
France said today it had launched air strikes against Islamic State militants in Syria in an effort to stem its growing presence there.
France has been the site of a number of terrorist attacks this year.
Centcom spokesman Col. Patrick Ryder is calling on the Iraqi military to take Ramadi “as quickly as possible”, despite the Iraqi military having spent months unsuccessfully trying to surround the city, capital of the Anbar Province, and suffering significant casualties in doing so. “We’re not going to receive 4 to 5 million Syrians, so the problem has to be dealt with at source”, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.
And there appears to be a remarkable level of consistency in the armouries of all the main armed groups (i.e. mainly former Soviet stock with a smattering of North Atlantic Treaty Organisation standard US equipment) while early (2012-13) supplies of the so-called moderate armed groups in Syria came from Gulf states and Turkey and quickly proliferated to IS and others through battle field capture, affiliations or corruption, he noted.
With Russian Federation and Iran behind him, Assad will be in a strong position to work out an arrangement like that and emerge the victor in a long and bloody civil war, in which he deployed weapons of mass destruction against his own people.
But as for the future of Syria, once the terror gangs have been routed, he called for a “political solution”, because “no side can finish off the other“.
Advertisement
France also planned to hold talks about Syria with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani.
