Secretary of State John Kerry, who said last month that reaching an “understanding” with Russian Federation was “the most important thing” in moving Syria forward, plans to push the deal when he meets Thursday in Moscow with President Vladimir Putin. A US -led alliance is also conducting airstrikes against Islamic State and Nusra in Syria.
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The State Department said Russian police “attacked” the diplomats.
“We need to get beyond these periods of calm, or whatever we are calling them, and get to a national cessation of hostilities”, Toner said. As one U.S.official asked: “What do we gain?”
US intelligence officers are incensed by the administration’s continued overtures to Russia, in part because they say the Russians knew that two rebel camps they bombed this week were far from any Islamic State fighters and housed USA -backed rebels or their families.
Despite a cease-fire ostensibly in effect since February, Syrian planes have kept up a steady bombardment of both civilian and opposition sites – where they have argued that al-Nusra forces, exempt from the truce, are mixed with rebel groups covered by the accord. Negotiations to broker a peace agreement have collapsed amid an upsurge in fighting, particularly around Aleppo, the former commercial capital that’s a key rebel bastion.
US officials said no agreement with Moscow has yet been reached.
The online newspaper said that for implementation of the new agreements, if they were to be signed, “the United States is suggesting a new military command-and-control headquarters to coordinate the air campaign that would house US and Russian military officers, intelligence officials and subject-matter experts”. He has deployed limited USA air power, along with a small number of covert forces on the ground.
Russian Federation and the United States are nominally co-chairs of global efforts to bring Assad’s regime to the negotiating table with armed opposition groups.
“The situation has reached a dead-end and without U.S”. “This will be one of the main issues we will discuss with John Kerry because it is a commitment the USA has entered into”, he said in Azerbaijan.
Kerry is expected to offer Moscow enhanced coordination and intelligence-sharing for targeting Islamic rebel groups in Syria with airstrikes and other attacks. But there is no coordination of attacks but rather an exchange of limited information to prevent unintended strikes.
The latest evidence of that came on Wednesday, when Russian Federation refused to let Jeff Shell, chairman of the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees Radio Free Europe and other government-backed news outlets, enter the country.
Defense Secretary Ash Carter was initially opposed to the proposal, but he ultimately supported it amid pressure from the White House last month.
A frame grab taken from footage released by Russia in 2015 shows a pilot of the Russian air force during a sortie in Syria. The U.S. now sees the ongoing expansion al Qaeda affiliate as risky.
“In Syria, as [ISIS] is losing territory in the east, its terrorist rival – Jabhat al-Nusra – is gaining ground in the west”, Brett McGurk, the U.S. special presidential envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter IS, said June 28 in written testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
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The stated goal of airstrikes that Russian Federation began last fall was “to fight ISIL and. assist the political transition in Syria towards a post-Assad government”, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said late last month.
