Putin risks Syria mire, Obama says

Russian President Vladimir Putin faces questions from journalists as he leaves Elysee Palace in Paris, where he met Friday with French and German leaders to discuss Syrian President Bashar Assad’s future.
Russian President Vladimir Putin faces questions from journalists as he leaves Elysee Palace in Paris, where he met Friday with French and German leaders to discuss Syrian President Bashar Assad’s future.

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama said Russia will get "stuck in a quagmire" if it persists in using military force to prop up Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime and urged efforts toward a political transition.

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AP

Syria’s Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem said Friday in his United Nations address that Russian bombing of targets in Syria was requested by the government to support Syria’s fi ght against terrorism.

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Qasioun News/Ap

This image taken from video provided by the Syrian activist media group Qasioun News, which has been verified and is consistent with other AP reporting, shows smoke rising from a Syrian government airstrike in rural Douma in Syria.

His comments came after Syria's foreign minister told the United Nations General Assembly on Friday that airstrikes against the Islamic State group "are useless" unless they are coordinated with the Syrian government, as the international community rushed to respond to Russia's airstrikes in his country.

Also Friday, the Russian Defense Ministry said it had bombed seven targets in Syria in overnight air raids, including a command post and a training camp near the northwestern city of Raqqa that would be the first strike in an area held by the Islamic State.

Russian President Vladimir Putin intervened in Syria "not out of strength but out of weakness because his client, Mr. Assad, was crumbling, and it was insufficient for him to send them simply arms and money," Obama said at a news conference Friday at the White House.

In his first public comments about the Syrian conflict since Russian warplanes began attacking targets in the country Wednesday, Obama criticized Putin for supporting Assad with a military campaign that conflicts with U.S. strategy and vowed not to let the conflict become a U.S.-Russia "proxy war." The U.S. is intent on destroying the Islamic State, and Obama has said Syria's larger civil war requires a political resolution that would remove Assad from power.

"It's only strengthening ISIL, and that's not good for anybody," Obama contended of Russia's involvement, using an acronym for the Islamic State.

He said he hoped Putin would come to realize that allying Russia with Iran to try to keep Assad in power "is just going to get them stuck in a quagmire, and it won't work. And they will be there for a while if they don't take a different course."

Obama said Putin has stepped deeper into a conflict that cannot be solved by military power alone, and that his approach is misguided in not distinguishing between Syrian rebels who want Assad ousted and those who are terrorists.

"From their perspective they're all terrorists, and that's a recipe for disaster," Obama said.

A 90-minute meeting Monday between Obama and Putin at the United Nations General Assembly didn't produce a clear understanding of Russia's intentions in Syria. Less than 48 hours after the two leaders shared a tense handshake in New York, Russia began what White House spokesman Josh Earnest called "indiscriminate" air attacks in the country.

Military officials from Russia and the U.S. began discussing operations inside Syria on Thursday, attempting to avoid an inadvertent confrontation in the country's skies. Those talks are expected to continue. U.S. officials say that Russia has attacked forces opposed to Assad that aren't part of the Islamic State.

"We don't believe that they struck ISIL targets," Army Col. Steve Warren, a Pentagon spokesman, said Thursday. "So that's a problem, right?"

Addressing the summit of world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly on Friday, Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem said Russia's decision to start bombing targets was based on the Assad government's request and is effective because it supports Syria's efforts to combat terrorism.

"Terrorism cannot be fought only from the air, and all of the previous operations to combat it have only served its spread and outbreak," al-Moallem said.

He pledged to continue the war against "terror" while also committing to a political track to end Syria's civil war, which is now in its fifth year and has killed more than a quarter of a million people. An estimated 4 million people have fled.

Despite severe losses on the battlefield and his country's growing reliance on Iran and Russia, al-Moallem also said his country's army "is capable of cleansing the country of those terrorists" and warned about the threat of a growing "caliphate state, which as you know, will not be limited to Syria or Iraq."

Al-Moallem announced Syria will participate in U.N.-led working groups toward a third round of peace talks in Geneva.

The U.N.'s envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura, has proposed four working groups on Syria as part of his latest efforts to bring Syria's parties toward an elusive agreement to end the conflict.

The groups are to hold simultaneous discussions among Syrian parties on issues such as protection of civilians, combating terrorism and political issues.

Al-Moallem stressed that the working groups proposed de Mistura are nonbinding. The foreign minister described them as "brainstorming" sessions meant to prepare for new peace talks sometime in the future.

Islamic State hit, Russia says

In Syria, Russian warplanes have struck targets deep inside the Islamic State's heartland province of Raqqa for the first time, Russia's Defense Ministry said Friday.

The strikes were carried out against an Islamic State training camp and a command post near the city of Raqqa, expanding the scope of the 3-day-old air campaign.

Those attacks continued Friday, with one U.S.-backed rebel group in the northwestern province of Hama saying its bases had been hit for the sixth time in three days by Russian jets.

Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, a spokesman for Russia's Defense Ministry, said the Raqqa strikes took place overnight Thursday and were among 18 sorties conducted over the previous 24 hours, raising to 30 the number of raids since Moscow began its air campaign in Syria.

Other targets hit included locations in the central province of Hama, where much of the countryside is controlled by an assortment of rebel groups ranging from moderate U.S.-backed rebels to the al-Qaida affiliate Nusra Front.

Russia insists, however, that many of its strikes have been against the Islamic State, even though the Islamic State is not present in the other provinces hit by Russian warplanes.

In Paris, the leaders of France, Russia and Germany met Friday in an effort to bridge differences over Assad's fate in the event of a political transition in Syria. French President Francois Hollande and Putin also discussed Russia's airstrikes and the need to protect civilians.

The United States and six allies and coalition partners, meanwhile, expressed "deep concern" about Russian strikes in Hama, Homs and Idlib provinces in western Syria -- attacks that they said "led to civilian casualties and did not target" the Islamic State. "These military actions constitute a further escalation and will only fuel more extremism and radicalization," the countries said in a joint statement.

"We call on the Russian Federation to immediately cease its attacks on the Syrian opposition and civilians and to focus its efforts on fighting ISIL," they said. Joining the United States in the statement were Britain, France, Germany, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

Russian Defense Ministry officials on Thursday released a video showing what they said was a strike on an Islamic State base in the Hama province town of Latamneh. Speaking from Latamneh on Friday, a rebel spokesman said the only military group in the town is the Free Syrian Army's Tajamu al-Izza brigade, which has received U.S. weaponry and training in the past and has been the target of all the Russian strikes there.

"They are doing this for two reasons. Firstly, because we are friends with the United States and they want to challenge the United States. And secondly, to vanquish the Free Syrian Army on the ground to show the world that only extremists are fighting Assad and that therefore he should survive," said the spokesman, Capt. Mustafa Moarati, before a huge explosion interrupted the call.

It was the second Russian strike of the day and the sixth in three days, he said.

"At least they could give us anti-aircraft missiles," he pleaded after the explosion died down.

The latest strikes came as Russian media reported that Moscow has readied additional sea power in the eastern Mediterranean to protect the skies over its air base in the Syrian port city of Latakia.

The Russian Interfax news service, which has close ties to the government, said the missile cruiser Moskva and an unspecified force of other ships in the region would begin military drills to prepare for a possible aerial attack.

The Islamic State, as well as the other rebel groups fighting in Syria, are not known to have any air power, but U.S. warplanes regularly fly over the country attacking Islamic State targets. The Israeli air force also makes occasional bombing raids against pro-government targets.

Western and Russian military analysts believe that the jet fighters and anti-aircraft weapons the Russians have positioned in Syria would be used to protect the base from an attack by the U.S.-led coalition, or to close the airspace in the region if the Russian government chose to do so.

In Moscow, a senior Russian diplomat said Friday that no progress had been made on a Russia-NATO hotline to defuse potential military conflicts, and that Russia would attempt to focus on bilateral "deconfliction" efforts with the United States instead.

The United States is leading a coalition of Western and Middle Eastern countries that have trained anti-Assad rebels and launched more than 7,000 airstrikes in Syria and Iraq in the past year.

"We have NATO's number; they have ours," Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexei Meshkov said, according to Interfax. "It's necessary to distinguish between two things: one thing is dialogue on contact between the military between Russia and the U.S., and the other is Russia and NATO. There is nothing between Russia and NATO so far."

Information for this article was contributed by Toluse Olorunnipa, Henry Meyer, Stepan Kravchenko, Ilya Khrennikov, Margaret Talev and Nicole Gaouette of Bloomberg News; by Zeina Karam, Cara Anna, Lolita C. Baldor and Robert Burns of The Associated Press; and by Liz Sly, Andrew Roth and William Branigin of The Washington Post.

A Section on 10/03/2015

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