On Friday, the Obama administration, under pressure from lawmakers, announced that it will be putting up to 50 USA special operations troops in northern Syria to advise and assist rebel forces there.
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Residents told AFP the roads were virtually empty because of fuel shortages, and several said they had been forced to cancel plans to travel overseas.
Furthermore, rebels shot down a Syrian government warplane with anti-aircraft fire on Wednesday in the western province of Hama, forcing its pilot to eject, a monitoring group and an insurgent media spokesman said. In September 2014, he said of the US strategy to combat Islamic State, “It will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil”.
By embedding Special Forces with local Sunni anti-ISIS groups, Heras said the administration hopes to build up a multi-ethnic democratic Syrian coalition and facilitate coordination with Kurdish fighters to bring the fight to ISIS.
US Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov spoke by phone on Wednesday to discuss the “logistics” of those talks, according to state department spokesman John Kirby.
Ms Patterson said that so far, United States diplomatic efforts have not led to any agreement on the fate of Assad.
Although United States troops are meant to remain stationed in the makeshift group headquarters of the Syrian rebels, Russian airstrikes may pose a potential threat to United States troops. “But we need [local] forces on the ground that will hold and build, or else we [Americans] will be there for a significant chunk of time”.
The problem is more a political issue than a military one. If borne out by an global investigation, however, Putin’s response will be to crack down, not back down, just as he did on Islamic militants in Russia’s breakaway region of Chechnya during the early years of his rule, officials say. Such raids will continue, the official said, against high-value Islamic State targets.
On the flip side, he is confronted by the realities of Islamic State’s seizure of large swaths of territory in Syria and Iraq and a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan.
The president has also made a decision to boost tactical aircraft available for the fight, putting in 12 A-10s that are useful to give support to fighters on the ground when the enemy has no aircraft and elementary air defenses. Another dozen more F-15 fighter bombers also are on their way.
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Advancing IS forces had managed to cut off the route at the end of October despite Russian air support and a government offensive south of Damascus.
