Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and French President Francois Hollande meet at the Elysee Palace in Paris yesterday.

As Russia carries out a third day of air strikes in Syria, President Vladimir Putin faces mounting international criticism over his military campaign

Reuters
Beirut/Moscow


Russia bombed Syria for a third day yesterday, mainly hitting areas held by rival insurgent groups rather than the Islamic State fighters it said it was targeting and drawing an increasingly angry response from the West.
The US-led coalition that is waging its own air war against Islamic State called on the Russians to halt strikes on targets other than IS.
“We call on the Russian Federation to immediately cease its attacks on the Syrian opposition and civilians and to focus its efforts on fighting ISIL,” said the coalition, which includes the United States, major European powers, Arab states and Turkey.
“We express our deep concern with regard to the Russian military build-up in Syria and especially the attacks by the Russian Air Force on Hama, Homs and Idlib since yesterday which led to civilian casualties and did not target Daesh,” it said.
ISIL and Daesh are both acronyms for Islamic State, which has set up a caliphate across a swathe of eastern Syria and northern Iraq.
In Syria, the group is one of many fighting against Russia’s ally, President Bashar al-Assad. Washington and its Western and regional allies say Russia is using it as a pretext to bomb other groups that oppose Assad. Some of these groups have received training and weapons from Assad’s foreign enemies, including the United States.
President Vladimir Putin held frosty talks with France’s Francois Hollande in Paris, Putin’s first meeting with a Western leader since launching the strikes two days after he gave an address to the United Nations making the case to back Assad.
Friday prayers were cancelled in insurgent-held areas of Homs province that were hit by Russian warplanes this week, with residents concerned that mosques could be targeted, said one person from the area.
“The streets are almost completely empty and there is an unannounced curfew,” said the resident, speaking from the town of Rastan which was hit in the first day of Russian air strikes.
Warplanes were seen flying high above the area, which is held by anti-Assad rebels but has no significant presence of IS fighters.
IS also cancelled prayers in areas it controls, according to activists from its de facto capital Raqa.
A Russian air strike on Thursday destroyed a mosque in the town of Jisr al-Shughur, captured from government forces by an alliance of Islamist insurgents earlier this year, activists said.
The United Nations said it had been forced to suspend planned humanitarian operations in parts of Syria due to the fighting.
Moscow said yesterday its latest strikes had hit 12 IS targets, but most of the areas it described were in western and northern parts of the country, while IS is mostly present in the east.
The Russian defence ministry said its Sukhoi-34, Sukhoi-24M and Sukhoi-25 warplanes had flown 18 sorties hitting targets that included a command post and a communications centre in the province of Aleppo, a militant field camp in Idlib and a command post in Hama.
A defence ministry official, Igor Konashenkov, later told Russian news agencies the air force had conducted 14 flights in Syria yesterday and made six strikes against IS targets. The ministry was not immediately available to comment on the apparent discrepancy with the earlier figures.
The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the conflict with a network of sources on the ground, said there was no IS presence at any of those areas.
Russia has however also struck IS areas in a small number of other attacks further east. The Observatory said 12 IS fighters were killed near Raqa on Thursday, and planes believed to be Russian had also struck the IS-held city of Qarytayn.
Russia has said it is using its most advanced plane, the Sukhoi-34, near Raqa, the area where it is most likely to encounter US and coalition aircraft targeting IS.
The US-led coalition said it conducted 28 air strikes on IS targets in Syria and Iraq on Thursday.
Hollande and Putin both looked stern at their talks in Paris, exchanging terse handshakes for the cameras.
Hollande laid out France’s conditions for supporting Russian intervention, which include a halt to strikes on groups other than IS and Al Qaeda, protections for civilians and a commitment to a political transition that would remove Assad.
“What I told President Putin was that the strikes should concern Daesh and only Daesh. On that basis we have to hold everyone to their responsibilities,” Hollande told reporters after the talks on Syria that lasted more than an hour.
Putin’s decision to launch strikes on Syria marks a dramatic escalation of foreign involvement in a four-year-old civil war in which every major country in the region has a stake.
Lebanese sources have said that hundreds of Iranian troops have also arrived in recent days in Syria to participate in a major ground offensive alongside government troops and their Lebanese and Iraqi Shia militia allies.








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