The US President Barack Obama made phone calls last week regarding Syria to the leaders of two key Middle East allies – Turkish President Recep Erdogan and the UAE Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.
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News of the Aleppo offensive comes the same day the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based activist group monitoring the conflict, reported an airstrike by unidentified war planes killed at least 40 IS fighters as they traveled by convoy from their stronghold in Raqqa province into the eastern countryside of Hama province.
Turkey also recently reported that unidentified aircraft and missile air defense systems based in Syria have been harassing its warplanes.
Separately, there are also many Iranian troops operating on the ground in Syria to back up stepped-up Russian airstrikes.
It added that a command point of the Nusra Front was destroyed in the Idlib province.
After more than four years of fighting that has left more than 250,000 dead, Assad’s regime is in control of about 30 percent of Syrian territory.
The Syrian military, backed by Russian airstrikes, has launched a new offensive against rebels in the country’s northwestern Aleppo province.
Moscow, for its part, has said it is targeting Islamic State even though the majority of its airstrikes have been on mainstream rebels, including some Free Syrian Army (FSA) factions trained and equipped by the U.S.
Thus, while the United States in particular and the West in general conduct endless, ardent, and pointless discussions in order to decide between direct involvement in the campaign in Syria (“boots on the ground”) and indirect military interventionand support of the activities of local forces (“Sandals on the ground”), Russia and Iran decided to take action and adopt a policy of direct involvement.
Alwalid Sukkarieh, a Lebanese military expert and Hezbollah-affiliated member of Lebanon’s parliament, agreed.
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“Just over two weeks have passed (since Russia’s intervention began), and the Syrian army is facing the full force of the armed factions, so the slow progress of the operations is logical in this initial phase”, Sukkarieh said.
