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Warplanes bomb east of Damascus after truce declared there -monitor

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Warplanes bombed a rebel-held area east of Damascus on Wednesday where Russia declared a ceasefire less than 24 hours earlier, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported.

There was no immediate comment from the Syrian military.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said on Tuesday a ceasefire had been agreed in Eastern Ghouta in Syria’s Damascus province until March 20. The Observatory said air strikes and artillery had hit three towns there.

A media unit run by Damascus ally Hezbollah said the Syrian air force had hit jihadists tied to Syria’s former al Qaeda offshoot in Irbeen city north east of Damascus, and also in al Qaboun, both in Eastern Ghouta.

The Syrian army has been closing in on the area in recent months, and towns there have seen an escalation of aerial raids and fighting on several frontline in recent days, according to opposition sources.

The army and its allies are seeking to force rebels to agree to truce deals similar to those that have led to evacuating thousands of opposition fighters to areas in the country’s north.

Before the Syrian conflict began in 2011, over half a million people lived in Eastern Ghouta, once a major economic hub serving the capital but now an ever shrinking area of sprawling urban districts and farmland whose population has dropped to tens of thousands.

(Writing by Tom Perry; Editing by Toby Chopra and John Stonestreet)

Plane strike hits Yemen mourners, killing 9 women, 1 child: residents

Yemen rubble after air strike that killed women and child

SANAA (Reuters) – Warplanes of the Saudi-led coalition struck a house north of Yemen’s capital where a crowd of mourners was gathered, residents said on Thursday, killing nine women and a child and injuring dozens.

The Saudi-led coalition said it was investigating reports of civilian casualties in the area.

The air strike hit the house of a local tribal leader in Ashira, a village north of Sanaa, on Wednesday night, a resident told Reuters. Mourners had gathered there to offer condolences after a woman died.

“People heard the sound of planes and started running from the house but then the bombs hit the house directly. The roof collapsed. Blood was everywhere,” a second resident of Ashira, who gave his name as Hamid Ali, told a Reuters cameraman.

Pictures published by local media showed tribesmen searching through the rubble of a destroyed house said to belong to Mohammed al-Nakaya, a tribal leader allied with Yemen’s Houthi movement.

One showed a man kneeling in the dust cradling the body of an elderly woman.

It was not immediately possible to verify the authenticity of the pictures.

“We are aware of media reports that Houthi rebels are claiming that Yemeni civilians were killed in an air raid overnight near Sanaa,” the coalition said in statement.

“There has been fighting between Yemeni armed forces and rebels in this area in recent days. We are investigating the reports.”

In October the alliance of mainly Gulf Arab states was heavily criticized after launching an air strike on a funeral gathering in Sanaa that killed 140 people, according to one U.N. estimate.

The death toll from that strike was one of the highest in any single incident since the alliance began military operations in March 2015 to try to restore the administration of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who the Houthis ousted.

The White House said at the time it might consider cutting its support to the Saudi-led campaign which has been providing air support for Hadi’s forces in a civil war that has killed more than 10,000 people and displaced millions.

The alliance, which says it does not target civilians, blamed the October funeral attack on incorrect information it said it received from the Yemeni military that armed Houthi leaders were in the area.

(Reporting by Mohammed Ghobari; Writing by Tom Finn and Sami Aboudi,; Editing by Toby Chopra and John Stonestreet)

World anger over ‘barbarous’ strikes in Syria, Russia sends more warplanes

People walk on the rubble of damaged buildings in the rebel held area of al-Kalaseh neighbourhood of Aleppo,

By Dmitry Solovyov and Ellen Francis

MOSCOW/BEIRUT (Reuters) – Russia is sending more warplanes to Syria to further ramp up its campaign of airstrikes, a Russian newspaper reported on Friday, as Moscow defied global censure over an escalation that Western countries say has torpedoed diplomacy.

In a statement issued by the White House after the two leaders spoke by telephone, U.S. President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel described the Russian and Syrian bombing of Aleppo as “barbarous”.

Fighting intensified a week into a new Russian-backed government offensive to capture all of Syria’s largest city and crush the last remaining urban stronghold of the rebellion.

Moscow and its ally, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, spurned a ceasefire this month to launch the offensive, potentially the biggest and most decisive battle in the Syrian civil war which is now in its sixth year.

Western countries accuse Russia of war crimes, saying it has deliberately targeted civilians, hospitals and aid deliveries in recent days to crush the will of 250,000 people trapped inside Aleppo’s besieged rebel-held sector.

Moscow and Damascus say they have targeted only militants.

Hundreds of people have been killed in the bombing and many hundreds more wounded, with little access to treatment in hospitals that lack basic supplies.

Children play with water from a burst water pipe at a site hit yesterday by an air strike in Aleppo’s rebel-controlled al-Mashad neighbourhood, Syria, September 30, 2016. REUTERS/Abdalrhman Ismail

Residents say the air strikes are unprecedented in their ferocity, deploying heavier bombs that flatten buildings on top of the people huddled inside.

Russia joined the war exactly a year ago, tipping the balance of power in favor of its ally Assad, who is also supported by Iranian ground forces and Shi’ite militia from Lebanon and Iraq.

The Kremlin said on Friday there was no time frame for Russia’s military operation in Syria. The main result of Russian air strikes over the past year is “neither Islamic State, nor al Qaeda nor the Nusra Front are now sitting in Damascus”, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

“REALITY A NIGHTMARE”

Britain’s Special Representative to Syria, Gareth Bayley, said: “From Russia’s first air strikes in Syria, it has hit civilian areas and increasingly used indiscriminate weapons, including cluster and incendiary munitions.”

“Today, the reality in Syria is a nightmare. Aleppo is besieged again, with vital necessities such as water, fuel, and medicine running out for hundreds of thousands. Civilian infrastructure, including schools and hospitals, are being attacked.”

The Izvestia newspaper reported that a group of Su-24 and Su-34 warplanes had arrived at Syria’s Hmeymim base.

“If need be, the air force group will be (further) built up within two to three days,” it quoted a military official as saying. “Su-25 ground attack fighters designated to be sent to Hmeymim have already been selected in their units and their crews are on stand-by, awaiting orders from their commanders.”

The Su-25 is an armored twin-engine jet which was battle-tested in the 1980s during the Soviet war in Afghanistan. It can be used to strafe targets on the ground, or as a bomber. Russia’s defense ministry did not immediately respond to a request from Reuters for comment.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Thursday there was no point pursuing further negotiations with Russia over Syria. That leaves Washington – which is fighting Islamic State militants in northern Syria but has avoided direct involvement in the war between Assad and his main opponents – with no backup plan for a policy that hinged on talks co-sponsored with Moscow.

BATTLEFIELD VICTORY

After months of intensive diplomacy with Russia, conducted despite the scepticism of other senior Obama administration officials, Kerry reached agreement three weeks ago on a ceasefire. But it collapsed within a week, and Moscow and Damascus swiftly launched the latest escalation.

Western officials believe Moscow’s decision to spurn the truce signals the Kremlin believes Assad’s government can now win a decisive victory on the battlefield, after years of mostly stalemated war that killed hundreds of thousands of people and made half of Syrians homeless.

Syrian government forces and rebels fought battles on Friday in the city center and north of Aleppo, where government troops had re-captured a camp for Palestinian refugees on Thursday that had already changed hands once since the start of the attack.

The sides gave conflicting accounts of the outcome of Friday’s fighting. North of the city, the military said it had captured territory around the Kindi hospital near the refugee camp. Rebel sources denied the army had advanced there.

In the city center, the military said it had advanced in the Suleiman al-Halabi district. Rebel officials said troops had moved forward but had subsequently been forced to withdraw.

A Syrian military source said government forces captured several buildings in the area and were “continuing to chase the remnants of the terrorists fleeing them”. One of the rebel officials said government forces had “advanced and then retreated”, losing “a number of dead”.

The multi-sided Syrian civil war pits Assad, a member of the Alawite sect supported by Iran and Shi’ite militia, against rebels mainly drawn from Syria’s Sunni Muslim majority, backed by Saudi Arabia and other regional Sunni states.

RISE OF ISLAMIC STATE

The rebellion includes several groups inspired by or linked to al Qaeda, and helped give rise to Islamic State, a hardline Sunni group that broke away from al Qaeda and declared a caliphate in swathes of Syria and Iraq.

Russia, which has been allied to Assad and his father since the Cold War, says the only way to defeat Islamic State is to support Assad. Washington and its European allies say the Syrian leader has too much blood on his hands and must leave power so the rest of the country can unite against the militants.

Some rebels have responded to the government onslaught by cooperating more closely with jihadist fighters – precisely the opposite of Washington’s aim. The rebels are demanding more weapons, above all anti-aircraft missiles.

Washington, which helps to coordinate the arming of rebel groups with weapons from Saudi Arabia and other states, opposes sending anti-aircraft missiles for fear they could fall into the hands of jihadists.

A Syrian rebel source familiar with the details of foreign military support said rebels had received promises of new arms, but so far there was nothing that would have an impact.

“If they don’t give us anti-aircraft, they have no value,” the source said.

(Additional reporting by Tom Perry, Angus McDowall, Lisa Barrington in Beirut; Eric Beech in Washington, Dmitry Solovyov in Moscow, writing by Peter Graff, editing by Peter Millership)

Jets pound Aleppo’s rebel-held areas, defying U.S.

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Warplanes mounted the heaviest air strikes in months against rebel-held districts of the city of Aleppo overnight, rebel officials and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Thursday.

There was no immediate comment from the Syrian military on the reports, or mention of Aleppo air strikes on state media.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry demanded on Wednesday that Russia and the Syrian government immediately halt flights over Syrian battle zones, in what he called a last chance to salvage a collapsing ceasefire and find a way “out of the carnage”.

“It was the heaviest air strikes for months inside Aleppo city. It was very intense. In that area we didn’t see heavy fighting recently,” said Observatory Director Rami Abdulrahman.

Zakaria Malahifji, head of the Aleppo-based Fastaqim rebel faction’s political office, said it was the most intense bombardment since April. “There is no weapon they didn’t use,” he said, speaking to Reuters from Turkey.

A senior official in the Levant Front, another Aleppo-based rebel group, also said it was the most intense bombardment in many months. There were 15 raids alone targeting two areas where his group had a presence, he added.

The rebel officials said weapons used included incendiary bombs. “This is a type of pressure on the opposition. The Russians only want surrender. They have no other solution,” the Levant Front official said.

Much of the recent fighting in the Aleppo area has been in a district of military colleges and industrial sites on its southwestern outskirts, rather than inside the city itself.

(Reporting by Tom Perry and Angus McDowall; Writing by Tom Perry; Editing by Larry King and Pravin Char)

U.S. warplanes launch bombing campaign on Islamic State in Libya

By Goran Tomasevic and Yeganeh Torbati

SIRTE, Libya/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. planes bombed Islamic State targets in Libya on Monday, responding to the U.N.-backed government’s request to help push the militants from their former stronghold of Sirte in what U.S. officials described as the start of a sustained campaign against the extremist group in the city.

“The first air strikes were carried out at specific locations in Sirte today causing severe losses to enemy ranks,” Prime Minster Fayez Seraj said on state TV. Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook said the strikes did not have “an end point at this particular moment in time”.

Forces allied with Seraj have been battling Islamic State in Sirte – the home town of former dictator Muammar Gaddafi – since May.

The militants seized the Mediterranean coastal city last year, making it their most important base outside Syria and Iraq. But they are now besieged in a few square kilometers of the center, where they hold strategic sites, including the Ouagadougou conference hall, the central hospital and the university.

Seraj said the Presidential Council of his Government of National Accord, or GNA, had decided to “activate” its participation in the international coalition against Islamic State and “request the United States to carry out targeted air strikes on Daesh (Islamic State).”

The air strikes on Monday – which were authorized by U.S. President Barack Obama – hit an Islamic State tank and two vehicles that posed a threat to forces aligned with Libya’s GNA, Cook said.

In the future, each individual strike will be coordinated with the GNA and needs the approval of the commander of U.S. forces in Africa, Cook added.

This was the third U.S. air strike against Islamic State militants in Libya. But U.S. officials said this one marked the start of a sustained air campaign rather than another isolated strike.

The last acknowledged U.S. air strikes in Libya were on an Islamic State training camp in the western city of Sabratha in February.

Although it does not include the use of ground troops beyond small special forces squads rotating in and out of Libya and drones collecting intelligence, the air campaign opens a new front in the war against IS and what American officials consider its most dangerous component outside Syria and Iraq.

Obama authorized the strikes after a recommendation by U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter. Washington took part in air strikes in 2011 to enforce a no-fly zone in Libya which helped topple Gaddafi. The country has struggled since then and Obama said in an interview with The Atlantic magazine in April that the intervention “didn’t work”.

OPERATIONS IN SIRTE AND SUBURBS

“I want to assure you that these operations are limited to a specific timetable and do not exceed Sirte and its suburbs,” Seraj said, adding that international support on the ground would be limited to technical and logistical help.

“GNA-aligned forces have had success in recapturing territory from ISIL (Islamic State) thus far around Sirte, and additional U.S. strikes will continue to target ISIL in Sirte in order to enable the GNA to make a decisive, strategic advance,” said Cook, the Pentagon spokesman.

The White House said U.S. assistance to Libya would be limited to air strikes and information sharing.

“There are unique capabilities that our military can provide to support forces on the ground and that’s what the president wanted to do,” White House spokesman Eric Schultz told reporters on Air Force One on Monday.

But that coordination will be a challenge, experts said.

Local forces in Libya fighting Islamic State are diffuse and fragmented, with no single center of command, said Frederic Wehrey, a Libya expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington who recently spent three days with fighters in Sirte.

“U.S. and Western diplomatic strategy has been to try to boost this GNA, but I think there are certain limits,” Wehrey said. “It’s not the sort of conventional military operation we would think of where there’s a central point of contact.”

U.S. and Libyan officials estimate that several hundred Islamic State fighters remain in Sirte.

Brigades mainly composed of militia from the western city of Misrata advanced on Sirte in May, but their progress was slowed by snipers, mines and booby-traps.

Those forces have complained that assistance from the government in Tripoli and external powers was slow to materialize. At least 350 of their fighters have been killed and more than 1,500 wounded in the campaign.

Libyan fighter jets have frequently bombed Sirte, but they lack the weapons and technology to make precision strikes.

Islamic State took advantage of political chaos and a security vacuum to start expanding into Libya in 2014. It gained control over about 250 km (155 miles) of sparsely populated coastline either side of Sirte, though it has struggled to win support or retain territory elsewhere in the country.

The GNA was the result of a U.N.-mediated deal signed in December to end a conflict between two rival governments and the armed groups that supported them. But it is having difficulty imposing its authority and winning backing from factions in the east.

Western powers have offered to support the GNA in its efforts to tackle Islamic State, stem the flow of migrants across the Mediterranean and revive Libya’s oil production.

But foreign intervention is politically sensitive, and the GNA has hesitated to make formal requests for help.

U.S. officials were developing military options in Libya earlier this year. But enormous hurdles, including struggles in the formation of a unified Libyan government strong enough to call for and accommodate foreign military assistance, stood in the way. [nL2N15K24F]

Small teams of Western countries’ special forces have been on the ground in eastern and western Libya for months. Last month France said three of its soldiers had been killed south of the eastern city of Benghazi, where they had been conducting intelligence operations.

(Additional reporting by Ahmed Elumami in Tripoli and Idrees Ali in Washington; Editing by Yara Bayoumy and Dan Grebler)

White House Reports U.S. Jets Intercept Russian Warplanes near Korean Peninsula

Four fighter jets were launched by the U.S. Navy to intercept Russian warplanes that were flying one nautical mile away from the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan.

According to White House spokesman Josh Earnest, the USS Ronald Reagan was performing a military exercise with South Korea in the Sea of Japan. Korean jets first intercepted the Russian warplanes. The Navy also stated they tried to communicate with the Russian planes, but never received a response.

Yahoo! News reports that Earnest stated the situation was “not a particularly threatening encounter,” as there was no evidence that the Russian planes posed any threat to the aircraft carrier or the ships that were escorting it.

The situation comes after an agreement was signed between Russia and the United States on October 10 that established protocols for flying over Syria. The agreement was to avoid any crashes between pilots.

Today’s incident isn’t the first time the U.S. and Russia has experienced encounters like this in 2015. A video was released by the Navy in June that showed Russian jets flying near the guided missile destroyer USS Ross. On July 4, Russian fighter jets located off the coasts of Alaska and California were intercepted by the United States, according to CNN.

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