The New York Times reported on September 4, quoting unidentified us administration officials, that Russian Federation has dispatched a military advance team to Syria and has sent prefabricated housing units for hundreds of people to a Syrian airfield and delivered a portable air-traffic-control station there.
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At the same time, Russian Federation has requested the necessary over-flight rights to fly military cargo aircraft into the airfield.
“We really want to create some kind of an worldwide coalition to fight terrorism and extremism”, Putin told journalists on the sidelines of the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, saying he had spoken to US President Barack Obama on the matter. He was known for his opposition to both Assad and the Islamic State extremists who have taken over a third of the country but was a strong supporter of the rebels trying to topple Assad.
On Friday, Putin presented his own ideas, which he said had been endorsed by Assad.
Sweida is a predominantly Druze region that largely has stayed out of the civil war raging in Syria since 2011.
The successful conclusion of a nuclear deal negotiated between Iran and six world powers appears to have quietly touched off a process of regional recalibration that potentially could affect the four-year-old civil war in Syria. The paper concluded that “despite the fact that the regime in Damascus is Russia’s key ally in the Middle East, there isn’t much to suggest that Putin would have any interest in sending combat ground troops to a country that is well on its way to its dissolution”.
The second bomb was detonated near Suwayda’s state-run hospital, killing those carrying the victims of the first blast, according to the report. Saudi foreign minister Adel al-Jubeir said they are now attempting to get confirmation of whether the Russian Federation had offered direct military assistance to Syria and expressed his alarm at the idea.
Tensions were mounting in Sweida on Saturday, however, with anti-government protests spreading across the city. By the way, people are running away not from the regime of Bashar Assad, but from Islamic State, which seized large areas in Syria and Iraq, and are committing atrocities there.
City elders appealed for calm, warning against attempts to drag the province toward violence. As we said sometime ago, Moscow felt it was pushed into the Chinese arms, and that was an embrace it had refused for two decades.
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Syrian media also carried a statement from Sheikh Yusuf Djerbou, a notable figure in the Druze community, who blamed the Friday attacks on “enemies of Syria and advocates of sedition”.
