Thursday, October 1, 2015

Second day of Airstrikes for Russia: Still not hitting ISIS

If Russia is hitting a rival coalition that fights ISIS what is going on here?

Russia Said to Carry Out 30 Airstrikes in Syria on 2nd Day of Raids

New York Times - ‎37 minutes ago‎
BEIRUT, Lebanon - In a second day of raids in Syria, Russian warplanes carried out 30 airstrikes on Thursday in the northern province of Idlib that targeted not the Islamic State but a rival insurgent coalition, according to a Lebanon-based news ...
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Photo
A video still, which the Russian Defense Ministry said showed an airstrike in Syria on Wednesday. Credit Russian Defence Ministry, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
BEIRUT, Lebanon — In a second day of raids in Syria, Russian warplanes carried out 30 airstrikes on Thursday in the northern province of Idlib that targeted not the Islamic State but a rival insurgent coalition, according to a Lebanon-based news channel that leans toward the Syrian government and is well sourced there.
The channel, Al Mayadeen, also said that Russia was targeting “a known list of terrorist organizations” that it had agreed on with the Syrian Army. If confirmed by Russia, that would be the first official admission that its military is targeting insurgents other than the Islamic State, also known as ISIL or ISIS.
The strikes on Thursday targeted the Army of Conquest, a coalition of insurgent groups that includes the Nusra Front, Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria, and a range of less-extreme Islamist groups. Often fighting alongside it are relatively secular groups from what is left of the loose-knit Free Syrian Army, including some that have received United States training and advanced American-made antitank missiles.
Continue reading the main story

Graphic

Mapping the Battle for Syria: Russian Airstrikes Hit Rebel Areas

Maps show that most of the areas hit by the airstrikes are controlled by rebel groups and that they are not in Islamic State territory.
OPEN Graphic
This year, the Army of Conquest dealt Syrian forces a serious setback by seizing the city of Idlib, and later, the entire province, advances that posed the war’s sharpest threat to the coastal areas where support for President Bashar al-Assad is strongest. Russia has a naval station on the coast and has concentrated much of its recent military buildup there.
The choice of targets underlined a fundamental dispute between the United States, its allies, and Syrian opponents of Mr. Assad on one side; and Mr. Assad and Russia on the other.
Mr. Assad, and now Russia, make little distinction among Islamist insurgent groups, and their supporters suggest that any such distinctions are meaningless hairsplitting. United States policy appears to reflect an acknowledgment that the Nusra Front and its allies — while many of them are unpalatable — often clash with the Islamic State and have differing goals and tactics.
The Syrian uprising began in 2011 with peaceful protests, and turned violent in response to repression by the government. But relatively secular groups led by army defectors have been eclipsed by better-financed, better-organized Islamist groups.
The United States, along with Syrian opposition groups, decried Russia’s first round of airstrikes, on Wednesday, because even as President Vladimir V. Putin said they were targeting the Islamic State, they did not hit known strongholds of the group. Instead, they targeted areas held by other insurgents, including some American-trained ones, in strikes that killed 40 people, including some civilians.
But the Army of Conquest itself embodies the ambivalence of American policy. The United States considers the Nusra Front a terrorist organization, but other groups, including some that have received American funding, fight alongside Nusra, saying that they have no choice if they want to unseat Mr. Assad.
The United States has been reluctant to increase support to those groups because some weapons have ended up in the hands of the Nusra Front, and Washington does not want to see the militant group take over Syria any more than it wants the Islamic State to take power.
 

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