Russia yesterday prepared to ramp up its bombing campaign in Syria as Moscow challenged the West’s distinction between jihadist and other Islamist rebel groups.
Russian bombing raids against what Moscow says are Islamic State targets went into their fifth day despite criticism from Washington and its allies that the military action may be strengthening the jihadists.
Russian President Vladimir Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Russia’s Western partners had failed to explain the term “moderate opposition” as monitors claimed that Russian jets had bombed two Syrian villages, killing one person.
Putin, who met the leaders of France and Germany in Paris on Friday, had “expressed a lively interest in the subject and asked what the difference between the moderate opposition and the immoderate opposition is,” Peskov said on television on Saturday. “So far, no one really has managed to explain what the moderate opposition is.”
Washington accuses Russia of seeking to buttress Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and making little distinction between Western-backed moderate opposition and the Islamic State.
However, Moscow is keen to try and turn the tables on Washington, suggesting that it is Washington and its allies that often hit the wrong targets.
“When the conversation has turned to this, our president remembered,” Peskov said of the Paris talks.
“He also remembered the wedding in Yemen and so on,” Peskov added, referring to more than 130 people killed during the recent bombing of a wedding for which the Saudi-led coalition denied responsibility.
US President Barack Obama called Russia’s intervention a “recipe for disaster,” but pledged Washington would not be drawn into a proxy war.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights yesterday said that “warplanes, believed to be Russian, carried out many strikes against two villages in the north of Homs Province.”
One person was killed and others injured, it said.
The areas that have been hit by the strikes are largely controlled by rebels, the Nusra Front and other Islamist groups, the observatory said.
Russia on Saturday also said that, over the previous 24 hours, fighter jets had destroyed a number of Islamic targets and dropped a concrete busting BETAB-500 bomb on a command post in the area of Raqa.
However, raids ordered by Moscow have also hit areas controlled by moderate groups and even prompted a claim by US Senator John McCain that Russian jets had killed rebel soldiers trained and funded by the CIA.
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