Thursday, November 05, 2015

Russia's Most Syrian Adventured #27

No word on the number of airstrikes recently.

Russia hit 263 targets in the last 48 hours with 80 odd sorties.

In Hama, the Assadites seem to be frustrated.  In Aleppo they seem to be marking progress in taking the city.  In Morek, they have been, at least temporarily, defeated and driven from the city despite bombing help.  If I understand correctly, Aleppo is where the Iranian ground troops are helping.  The Russian airstrikes may not be really effective.  Indeed, the Western airstrikes have not curtailed IS that much either.

Russia has officially acknowledged what we have known and heard from them unofficially: they placed anti aircraft missiles in Syria.  The reason ought to be obvious.

The Russian foreign ministry states they are unaware of any meetings with the Free Syrian Army.  Either one hand doesn't know what the other is doing or more Russian propaganda about working with the rebels against IS is nonsense.  Its really hard to decide which it'd be, frankly.

The British and Americans have come out to state the loss of the Russian airliner over Sinai is increasingly looking like an IS terrorist bomb.  As a consequence, flights to and from Egypt to Britain have been cancelled.  The Egyptians have stated they were not consulted before hand which is the norm and the Russians are stating the Brits are not sharing whatever information they have.  At the same time, the Russians are stating they think its far too early to declare what happened to the aircraft.  The truth is there are two possibilities: either really bad maintenance took out the airliner or an explosion.  The latter would most likely be a bomb given the ferocity of the breakup of the aircraft.

Russia has sent a plane full of humanitarian aid to Yemen.  hmmm.

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