by Yoni Hirsch, Eli Leon, Daniel Siryoti, News Agencies and Israel Hayom Staff
With the help of former Iraqi air force pilots, ISIS is test flying several fighter jets captured from Syrian bases • Pentagon shies from providing body count, but says several hundred ISIS fighters killed in Syrian border town in recent days.
Explosions from airstrikes on the Syria-Turkey border town of Kobani, the scene heavy fighting between ISIS and Syrian Kurds
Photo credit: Reuters  |
The Islamic State group (ISIS) has captured and is test flying, with the help of former Iraqi air force pilots, several fighter jets captured earlier from air bases belonging to the Syrian army, a Syrian activist group said Friday.
The report by the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights could not be independently confirmed, and a U.S. official said they had no reports of Islamic State militants flying jets in support of their forces on the ground.
The new development came as Islamic State in Iraq pressed its offensive on the strategic city of Ramadi, west of Baghdad. The militants appeared to be taking advantage of the focus of U.S.-led airstrikes on the Syrian Kurdish city of Kobani, along the border with Turkey, to concentrate on their second front in Iraq.
The Observatory said the planes, seen flying over the Jarrah air base in the countryside of Aleppo province in eastern Syria this week, are believed to be MiG-21 and MiG-23 jets. Rami Abdurrahman, director of the Observatory, said the planes have been flying at a low altitude, "apparently to avoid being detected by Syrian military radar in the area."
He described the flights as a "moral victory" for ISIS, saying "the jets could not fly much further without being knocked down by the [international] coalition."
The report on the flights in Aleppo added yet another layer of complexity to the Mideast crisis in the wake of the onslaught by ISIS militants.
In his first public overview of the campaign he leads from the Florida headquarters of U.S. Central Command, Army Gen. Lloyd Austin cautioned against expecting quick progress. He said he cannot predict how long it will take to right a wobbly Iraqi army and build a viable opposition ground force in Syria.
"The campaign to destroy [ISIS] will take time, and there will be occasional setbacks along the way," Austin told a Pentagon news conference, "particularly in these early stages of the campaign as we coach and mentor a force (in Iraq) that is actively working to regenerate capability after years of neglect and poor leadership."
While hammering the jihadists daily from the air, the U.S. military is talking of a years-long effort -- one that will require more than aerial bombardment, will show results only gradually and may eventually call for a more aggressive use of U.S. military advisers in Iraq.
"This isn't going to get solved through 18 airstrikes around a particular town in a particular place in Syria. It's going to take a long time," the Pentagon press secretary, Rear Adm. John Kirby, said Thursday, referring to a recent concentration of American airstrikes on Kobani.
That is one reason why the Pentagon is preparing to set up a more formally organized command structure, known in military parlance as a joint task force, to lead and coordinate the campaign from a forward headquarters, perhaps in Kuwait. On Wednesday it formally named the campaign "Operation Inherent Resolve."
As of Thursday the U.S. had launched nearly 300 airstrikes in Iraq and nearly 200 in Syria, while allies had tallied fewer than 100, according to Central Command. Those figures don't capture the full scope of the effort because many airstrikes launch multiple bombs on multiple targets. Central Command said that as of Wednesday, U.S. and partner-nation air forces had dropped nearly 1,400 munitions.
Officials say the strikes have squeezed ISIS and slowed its battlefield momentum. More specifically, they claim they have destroyed an array of Islamic State military targets: command posts, sniper positions, artillery guns, armed trucks, tanks, mortar positions, buildings, mobile oil refineries and more. The Pentagon has shied from providing a body count, but Kirby said several hundred Islamic State fighters have been killed in Kobani alone in recent days.
Yet the militants are making gains in some parts of Iraq, particular in the Sunni-dominated Anbar province, even as they stall or retrench in other areas. At times they have appeared within reach of taking control of Kobani. Baghdad is not believed to be in imminent danger of falling but it is "certainly in their sights," Kirby said.
Meanwhile, a recent report by Asharq al-Awsat showed apparent cracks in the relatively young international coalition formed to fight ISIS. The London based media outlet reported that according to senior U.S. officials in the coalition's joint command, there has been a lot of tension between the Western and Arab members in the coalition. The cause of it is that the Arab states refuse to send ground forces to the fighting, and have stated that if they are ordered to do so, they will leave the coalition.
Meanwhile, Lebanese media outlets reported the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah visited the group's fighters in the Beqaa Valley between southern Lebanon and Syria. The rare visit took place under the cover of night and with a heavy security detail.
Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=20809
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