NATO and Obama Continue Support for ISIS, Putin Undaunted
Disagreement over the air space violations comes as Russia and the west dispute the aims of Moscow’s air campaign. Moscow says it is attacking Islamic State, but NATO and Obama want the attack on ISIS stopped.
While Obama and NATO were defending ISIS, Islamic State suicide bombers killed 22 people in attacks on Yemen’s government and its Gulf Arab coalition ally in the port city of Aden and on a Houthi-run mosque in the capital Sanaa on Tuesday, the jihadist group and state media said.
It was the first known direct Islamic State assault on the Yemeni government and the Saudi-led coalition that intervened in the country’s civil war in March against Iranian-backed Houthi forces who had seized large areas of the country to that point.
Four coordinated Islamic State suicide bombings killed 11 Yemeni and four United Arab Emirates soldiers in Aden, Yemeni officials and the UAE state news agency said.
In Sanaa, seven people were killed in the attack on the al-Nour mosque in the al-Nahda district of the Houthi-controlled capital, the Houthi-run state news agency said.
Claiming responsibility for the Sanaa bombing, Islamic State said in a statement that dozens of Houthis preparing to go to the battlefront had been killed or wounded.
The Sunni militant Islamic State is hostile to both the U.S.-backed Yemeni government and Arab coalition allies, as well as to the Shi’ite Muslim Houthis in Yemen’s complex conflict.
The Yemeni government returned from exile in Saudi Arabia and set up temporary headquarters in Aden’s al-Qasr hotel last month after Gulf Arab and Yemeni troops retook the major southern port city from Houthi forces.
Islamic State jihadists had hitherto refrained from openly targeting Yemen’s government and the Saudi-led coalition now fighting together to roll back Houthi domination over large areas of the Arabian Peninsula state.
Vice President Khaled Bahah, who is also prime minister, and cabinet colleagues escaped unharmed from what he said were car bomb attacks in Aden, two of which targeted the al-Qasr hotel.
“Today’s attack does not affect anybody. On the contrary, it binds us together more,” he told a cabinet meeting afterwards in comments carried by Dubai-based al-Arabiya television.
“We had come here to work and we know that there are security gaps… But this now prompts us to do more in the framework of reinforcing security in a bigger way by the general security services and armed forces.”
The United Arab Emirates state news agency WAM said suicide bombers also targeted two Gulf Arab military sites in Aden.
“In a blessed operation facilitated by God, four martyrdom operations targeted a gathering of Saudi, Emirati and Yemeni officers,” Islamic State said in a statement.
Western countries, Arab states and Turkey, who are waging their own mini bombing campaign against Islamic State say Moscow is using Islamic State as a pretext to target Assad’s other foes. Russia says ISIS should be the centerpiece of international efforts to combat extremism.
With Russian and NATO planes now flying combat missions in the same air space, a danger is that the Cold War enemies could fire on each other.
The skies in the area have seen incidents in the past. A Turkish jet was shot down by the Syrian air force in 2012 over the Mediterranean and earlier this year Turkey shot down a Syrian helicopter that Ankara said violated its airspace.
NATO is using the accidental incursion into Turkish air space for propaganda.
“The impression is that the incident in Turkish air space was used to plug NATO as an organization into the information campaign waged by the West to distort the aims of the operations carried out by the Russian air force in Syria,” Alexander Grushko was quoted by Itar-Tass news agency as saying in Brussels.
Russia’s defense ministry said it agreed in principle with U.S. proposals on coordinating military flights in Syria. The ministry said it was ready to hold talks with Turkey to avoid “misunderstandings” and invited foreign military officers to Moscow for talks on how best to fight Islamic State.
President Vladimir Putin has said he will not put Russian ground forces in Syria, where the civil war has killed 250,000 people. However, Stoltenberg said there was a growing presence of Russian forces in Syria.
“I can confirm that we have seen a substantial build-up of Russian forces in Syria – air forces, air defenses, but also ground troops in connection with the air base they have, and we also see an increased naval presence,” Stoltenberg said.
Several senior officials in the Middle East told Reuters the Russian air campaign was part of plan that will also involve a ground offensive by Iranian troops, Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas and Syrian government forces against Assad’s foes.
The ground campaign is being led by Qassem Soleimani, commander of Iran’s Quds Force, the elite extra-territorial special forces arm of the Revolutionary Guards who reports directly to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the officials said.
They said Soleimani traveled to Moscow in July to help plan the joint action after senior Russian officials met Khamenei and senior Iranians met Putin to agree it.
U.S. officials have previously said Russia has sent seven T-90 tanks, some artillery, and about 200 marines. It has also deployed temporary housing units, a portable air traffic control station and components for an air defense system.
Russian defense ministry sources have been quoted in Russian media as saying about 1,500 Russian servicemen are involved in supporting the air strikes and advising Syria’s army.
The Russian Defence Ministry says it has more than 50 warplanes and helicopters in Syria. Russia’s Tartous naval facility there is a logistics base and has been overhauled in recent years. It is being used to unload equipment, some of which is also being flown in.
In the latest strikes, Russian jets hit Islamic State targets in Palmyra and struck the northern province of Aleppo, Syrian state television said.
Islamic State forces captured Palmyra in May, an advance that brought them closer to the core of government-held territory in western Syria. It also put the city’s Roman-era ruins under the militants’ control.
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