A summary of the airstrikes that was released by Syria’s state news agency listed many targets near the city of Homs in western Syria, an area known for anti-government sentiment that is far from ISIS strongholds such as Raqqa or Palmyra.
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Russian Federation launched air strikes in Syria on Wednesday for the first time since that country’s civil war began in 2011.
A second day of Russian airstrikes battered positions in Syria on Thursday, while diplomats peddled conflicting reports as to which groups Moscow’s planes were targeting.
Here & Now’s Robin Young turns to security analyst Jim Walsh to discuss this escalating conflict that now involves just about all world’s major powers.
At a news conference Thursday, Lavrov said that the U.S.-led coalition said its targets are Islamic State militants, the al-Qaida-affiliated al-Nusra Front and other terrorists.
The ministry’s spokeswoman, Marzieh Afkham, said the “Islamic Republic of Iran considers military action by Russian Federation against armed terrorist groups to be a step toward fighting terrorism and toward resolving the current crisis” in Syria.
Asked Thursday whether Putin was satisfied with the way the Russian campaign was going, Peskov said it was “too early” to say.
U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter said Russia’s approach to the Syrian war – defending Assad while ostensibly targeting extremists – was tantamount to “pouring gasoline on the fire”.
Despite this, the Russian Foreign Ministry said it does not intend joining a US-led coalition in the fight against IS militants.
The USA defense chief also said the Obama administration was open to holding direct talks with the Russians on “deconflicting” their military operations in Syria, or arranging ways to avoid firing upon each other or creating unintended incidents in the air.
He said the results of Russia’s Wednesday strikes were “representative of what you’d expect from dumb bombs being dropped from airplanes at medium altitude, which was not that impressive”.
All are opposed to IS and have fought bloody battles with the jihadist group.
The Russian foreign minister declined to be drawn into questions about which specific groups were considered terrorists, but added that the US- and Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army was not among them.
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“We are ready for such information attacks,” he said in a live broadcast from the Kremlin. The attacks also raised the unsafe specter of Washington and Moscow running air strikes concurrently and in the same region, but without coordination.
