ISIS/ISIL conflict in Syria/Iraq (No OpEd, No Politics)

Jura said:

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

was taken by ISIL thus directly threatening Homs - Damascus connection through "M5", plus I've read Mahin has been kinda stronghold ...

Click to expand...

Jura said:

...
and after three weeks, Mahin was taken back by the Government Forces ...

Click to expand...

Two months ago,

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

of an Iraqi CH-4B Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) was performed during the visit of Defence Minister, Mr. Khaled al-Obeidi at al-Kut Air Base. On December 6th, a CH-4B from 84th Squadron was engaged for the first time in an airstrike in Ramadi destroying an artillery piece hidden in a factory. This gun was targeting Iraqi forces stationed at Palestine Bridge north of the city. On 25 November, with the support of the bombing of the international coalition led by the US, Iraqi security forces (ISF) and anti-terrorism forces regained Palestine Bridge, which crosses the Euphrates. The video below show the FLIR of one of these drones targeting a gathering of ISIS fighters, western of the city of Ramadi, destroying one vehicle with an HG-10 ATGM (Anti-Tank Guided Missile). Iraq ordered CH-4B to China, probably after the visit of Chinese foreign minister in February 2014. First batch was received on January 23rd, 2015.

Click to expand...

Jura said:

briefly updating:
... recently I saw

• some Assad's TV report from Khalsah, about three miles east from Zitan (so it's almost certain Zitan is Government-controlled) ...

Click to expand...

• Khalsah ("Khalasah")
• Zitan ("Zaytan)
  
• Az Zerbah ("Zerbeh" on "edmaps") which was recently taken by the Government Forces according to several sources
  
• the compound marked in red ("Industrial Area (Al Zerbah)") which was recently taken by the Government Forces (if I understood what I saw on Twitter)
• "M5" (the road, marked thick yellow):

Russia has further bolstered its strike capability in Syria by deploying another four Su-34 aircraft to the Humaymim Air Base in Latakia province, Airbus Defence and Space imagery captured on 7 December shows.

Airbus Defence and Space imagery shows that the number of Russian Su-34 strike aircraft deployed to Humaymim Air Base in Syria increased from four to eight between 1 and 7 December. (CNES 2015, Distribution Airbus DS / 2015 IHS)

The deployment, which happened sometime after 1 December, brings the number of Su-34s in Syria up to eight. Russia also has 11 Su-24M tactical bombers, 12 Su-25 attack aircraft, four Su-30SM multirole fighters, and an Il-20M electronic intelligence (ELINT) platform at the base. A 12th Su-24M was shot down by a Turkish F-16 on 24 November.
Russian responded to that incident by deploying an S-400 strategic surface-to-air missile (SAM) battery.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Click to expand...

U.S. President Barack Obama, facing criticism at home over his Islamic State strategy, is turning out to be right with his prediction that Vladimir Putin’s own campaign in Syria will descend into a quagmire.

Many senior officials in Moscow underestimated how long the operation in support of Bashar al-Assad would take when Putin entered Syria’s civil war on Sept. 30 and no longer talk in terms of just a few months, with one saying the hope now is that it won’t last several years.

With the mission in its third month, Putin is pouring materiel and manpower into Syria at a pace unanticipated by lawmakers already struggling to meet his spending goals. The plunging price of oil is sapping revenue and prolonging Russia’s first recession in six years, prompting the Defense Ministry this week to postpone some new weapons programs.

“This operation will last a year at a minimum,” said Frants Klintsevich, deputy head of the Defense Committee in the upper house of parliament. “I was expecting more from Syria’s army.”

‘Mission Creep’
Russia initially earmarked just $1.2 billion for the war for all of 2016, an official familiar with the matter said. Outlays were running at about $4 million a day before Putin’s mid-November surge in troops and hardware, which doubled the cost to $8 million, or almost $3 billion on an annualized basis, according to the Royal United Services Institute, or RUSI, a military research group based in London.

But there’s no backing down for Putin, who vowed to destroy Islamic State for the Oct. 31 bombing of a passenger jet over Sinai that killed 224 Russians.

The Russian leader is also locked in an increasingly

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whom he accused of supporting Islamic State through illicit oil sales, which Erdogan denies. Putin called Turkey’s downing of a Russian bomber two weeks ago “a stab in the back” that Erdogan will regret “again and again.”

“Putin will be forced to pull in more and more ground troops, further exposing them to attacks and further increasing the likelihood of mission creep,” said Joerg Forbrig, senior program director at the German Marshall Fund of the U.S. in Berlin. “One year is in no way near realistic.”

Soviet Decline
Putin is keenly aware of the risk of getting bogged down in an intractable conflict like the Soviet Union did after its invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, when Russians last fought in a Muslim land to suppress a revolt backed by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. The Afghan War, which caused the deaths of 15,000 Soviet soldiers, drained the economy at a time of low oil prices and sounded the death knell for global communism.

But avoiding another quagmire will depend on forging an international front against Islamic State, which Putin and his French counterpart Francois Hollande both favor. Obama has refused to join forces with Russia, though he has tempered his demands for Assad to step down, now saying the Syrian leader must eventually depart while leaving his military and institutions intact.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Wednesday that Russia has been “helpful” in the efforts to forge a transition in Syria, though his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov accused the U.S. and its allies of encouraging the spread of Islamic State through their calls for Assad’s ouster.

Obama has been under fire from Republicans who say he hasn’t been aggressive enough against the terrorist group, which controls swaths of Syria and Iraq. The U.S.-led coalition targeting Islamic State dropped 3,271 bombs in November, the most in its 16-month campaign,

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

.

‘Bogged Down’
“I think Mr. Putin understands that with Afghanistan fresh in the memory, for him to simply get bogged down in an inconclusive and paralyzing civil conflict is not the outcome that he’s looking for,” Obama said in Paris last week. “It is possible, over the next several months, that we’ll see a shift in calculations by the Russians.”

Maybe, but right now what those Russians are calculating is how best to maximize the combined capabilities of Syrian and Russian forces on land, in the air and at sea, according to Leonid Reshetnikov, a retired Foreign Intelligence Service general who now heads a Kremlin advisory group.

Assad’s fate isn’t an “insurmountable obstacle” but this isn’t an issue that can be resolved now, Reshetnikov said. “At the moment we need to concentrate on the fight against Islamic State.”

Shifting Strategy
While Syrian forces backed by Russian firepower have had some successes, such as breaking Islamic State’s two-year siege of a strategic air base near Aleppo, Putin is only now starting to realize that he can’t defeat the group through air power alone, said Anton Lavrov, a Russian military analyst.

While the U.S. and its allies have complained Putin’s focus has been on protecting Assad rather than stopping Islamic State, that strategy

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

. Russia is increasingly targeting the group’s oil operations and, for the first time in the campaign, launched missiles this week from a submarine at Raqqa, the heart of the self-declared caliphate.

Putin last month more than doubled the fleet of warplanes involved in bombing missions to about 70 and increased the number of ships in the operation to 10. Six of those are in the Mediterranean, including one carrying Russia’s most advanced air-defense system, the S400, which can cover all of Syria.

Troop Surge
Russia now has as many as 5,000 servicemen on the ground, more than double the original estimate of 2,000, according to RUSI researcher Igor Sutyagin. While Putin continues to rule out a land offensive, hundreds of advisers are already embedded with the Syrian army, he said.

Nobody in the Russian leadership is underestimating the difficulty of the challenge any more, according to Andrei Klimov, deputy head of the International Affairs Committee in the upper house of parliament.

“The threat we’re confronting is 45,000 to 50,000 fighters with military experience, fighters from Chechnya and Afghanistan, Syrian army officers that we trained ourselves.” Klimov said. “This is a very serious opponent.”

Click to expand...

Jura said:

interestingly, a Red Russian blogger (where I found it)

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

pretty much concurs
Putin's Quagmire in Syria Proves Obama Prescient

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Click to expand...

President Vladimir Putin said on Friday Russia is supporting the opposition Free Syrian Army, providing it with air cover, arms and ammunition in joint operations with Syrian troops against Islamist militants.

His statement appeared to be the first time Moscow said it was actually supporting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's opponents in the fight against Islamic State forces. Putin said last month the Russian air force had hit several "terrorist" targets identified by the Free Syrian Army.

A few hours later, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that Putin had been talking about weapons supplies to the armed forces loyal to Assad.

But Peskov did not say Putin had been mistaken or misquoted about supplies to the Free Syrian Army and did not deny weapons were going to the opposition force.

Western and Arab states carrying out air strikes against Islamic State for more than a year say that Russian jets have mainly hit other rebel forces in the west of Syria.

Asked about Putin's remarks at a briefing, U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby said it was "unclear to us ... whether these claims of support to the FSA are true" and noted that "the vast majority" of Russian air strikes had targeted groups opposed to Assad.

British Defense Secretary Michael Fallon, speaking at a Pentagon news conference after talks with his U.S. counterpart, said Russia "began by bombing the Free Syrian Army" and it was "welcome" news if they were now supporting them.

"What they've got to do is stop propping up the Assad regime, stop bombing opposition groups who are opposed to the Assad regime ... and get behind the political process that is now under way of leading that country to a more pluralist government and a future without Assad," he said.

Putin told an annual meeting at the Russian defense ministry that on Friday Russian planes were assisting "in uniting the efforts of government troops and the Free Syrian Army".

"Now several of its units numbering over 5,000 troops are engaged in offensive actions against terrorists, alongside regular forces, in the provinces of Homs, Hama, Aleppo and Raqqa," he said, referring to the Free Syrian Army.

"We support it from the air, as well as the Syrian army, we assist them with weapons, ammunition and provide material support."

When asked if Putin had been speaking about the Free Syrian Army, Peskov replied: "Please do not cling to meanings in this case. Such an interpretation is possible."

"Russia supplies weapons to the legitimate authorities of the Syrian Arab Republic," he said.

Putin said strikes by Russia's air force and navy had inflicted heavy damage on the infrastructure of Islamic State, which controls large areas of eastern Syria and western Iraq.

Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said, however, that the influence of Islamic State was increasing in Syria, where militants control roughly 70 percent of the country.

The number of Islamic State fighters in Iraq and Syria is about 60,000, Shoigu said, and there is a threat of violence spilling over into post-Soviet Central Asia and the Caucasus.

Talking to his generals, Putin issued a veiled warning to Turkey, whose downing of a Russian bomber jet near the Syrian-Turkish border last month sent bilateral relations to a freezing point and led Moscow to impose economic sanctions to Istanbul.

"I want to warn those who may again try to stage provocations against our troops," he said.

"I order you to act in an extremely tough way. Any targets threatening Russia's (military) group or our land infrastructure must be immediately destroyed," Putin told the generals.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu on Friday called on Russia for calm, but said Turkey's patience is not unlimited.

Click to expand...