Speaking after a meeting between Putin and the Saudi defence minister in the southern Russian city of Sochi, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said “the two sides discussed practical steps to reach a political settlement in Syria”.
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“The discussions were professional and focused narrowly on the implementation of specific safety procedures”, Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook said in an October 10 statement.
Government forces concentrated in Damascus and the centre and west of Syria are fighting the jihadists of Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra, as well as less numerous so-called “moderate” rebel groups, who are strongest in the north and east. These groups are also battling each other.
The latest round of military contacts came nine days after defence officials of the two countries held their first round of talks on airstrikes in Syria.
Syrian opposition figures and Western governments say Russian Federation has targeted rebel groups – including a few trained and equipped by the United States – that are not linked to IS militants. Abdulrahman states that’s, a minimum of, an oblique results of Russian airstrikes on more moderate rebels. “We need to be adaptive,” he said.
Moscow is mounting air strikes and missile attacks that it says are aimed both at supporting its longtime ally Assad and combating Islamic State.
“We are not planning on doing this (conducting a ground operation), and our Syrian friends know about this”, Putin said in an interview broadcast on state-run Rossiya-1 television channel.
“The Americans have handed us a document, which we are working on”. The Observatory said the rebels advanced on a hill overlooking Atshan overnight.
Now there are concerns there could be an accidental clash between the Russian military and a United States-led coalition as both pursue separate bombing campaigns over the Middle East nation.
Syrian rebel fighters shoot through a hole in a wall towards forces loyal to the regime in 2013 in Aleppo.
“I was not satisfied with the early efforts in that regard, and so we are looking at different ways to achieve the same strategic objectives, which is the right one, which is to enable capable motivated forces on the ground to retake territory from ISIL and reclaim Syrian territory from extremism so we have devised a number of different approaches to that going forward”, Carter said.
This attracted derision from U.S. lawmakers, who said the programme should be scrapped altogether. More than 100 people were killed, a lot of them in the security operation to end the siege.
Syrian forces backed by Hezbollah militants from Lebanon are said to have made significant advances against rebels after heavy Russian air strikes.
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Meanwhile, the United States is dropping a $500 million Pentagon program to train Syrian rebels fighting the administration of President Bashar al-Assad, the New York Times reported on Friday, citing unidentified Obama administration officials.
