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Russia Denies U.S. Claim That Missiles Aimed at Syria Hit Iran | |
(about 11 hours later) | |
BRUSSELS — Four cruise missiles in a barrage of 26 fired by Russia’s warships in the Caspian Sea at rebel targets in Syria crashed in a rural area of northern Iran instead, senior United States officials said on Thursday. | |
Russian and Iranian officials dismissed the claim as a nonsensical propaganda ploy, as the Kremlin intensified military coordination with the newly emboldened forces of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria to turn the tide of the war. Russian warplanes flew supporting missions for Syrian troops advancing on insurgent positions in a hotly contested area of Hama Province, rebels and a monitoring group in Syria reported. | |
It was unclear exactly where in Iran the Russian missiles might have landed, or whether they caused any casualties or damage. The United States officials said the flight path of the Russian cruise missiles, called Kalibrs, would have taken them across northern sections of Iran and Iraq en route to Syria. | |
Of the 26-missile volley, the officials said, four went awry and hit northern Iran, according to technical sources of information like radar and satellite imagery. | |
The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss military intelligence. | |
News of the apparent crashes, which were first reported by CNN, came as Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter sharply criticized what he called Russia’s “unprofessional” conduct in its incursion into Syria. Speaking at a NATO news conference in Brussels, Mr. Carter said that Moscow had fired the cruise missiles with no advance notice. | |
Mr. Carter warned, “In coming days, the Russians will begin to suffer casualties.” | |
American officials also said that some sort of problem with the missiles should not have been unexpected, since they had never been fired in wartime. | |
“This was the first operational test of these in operational conditions,” one official said of the Russian Kalibrs. | |
An American defense official said it was something of a surprise that Russia had used cruise missiles to attack Syrian targets, given that those weapons were more commonly used in the face of heavy air defenses, which Syria rebel groups do not have. American military officials speculated that Russia may have wanted to show its cruise missile ability to the world. | |
In Moscow, Igor Konashenkov, a spokesman for the Russian military operation in Syria, denied that any of the missiles had fallen short of their targets. | |
Mr. Konashenkov said sarcastically that if the report were true, “We would have to admit that the sites of the terrorist group Islamic State in Syria, located far apart from one another, just blew up on their own.” | |
He also chastised Mr. Carter for his statement about Russian casualties, describing it as cynical and inappropriate. | |
“In its assessments of the American military’s actions in various operations, carried out all around the world, representatives of the Russian Ministry of Defense not once stooped as low as publicly awaiting the death of an American soldier,” Mr. Konashenkov said. “Not to mention of any ordinary American.” | |
An Iranian official, Hamidreza Taraghi, who is close to the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, laughed at the report that missiles had crashed, calling it “complete nonsense.” | |
Iran’s semiofficial Fars News Agency described the report as part of the West’s “psychological warfare” against the Russian-Iranian alliance with Mr. Assad. | |
A few social media users in Iran began linking the reported missile crashes to an explosion in northwestern Iran on Wednesday, when the official Islamic Republic News Agency, quoting the governor of the city of Takab, reported that an “unidentified flying object” had crashed in a mountainous area. That report also quoted locals as saying the explosion had broken windows. | |
Russia inadvertently revealed problems with seaborne missiles this summer when its navy conducted an errant launch. | |
The episode happened during a military parade in Sevastopol, the Crimean port city annexed from Ukraine in 2014, when a missile blew apart on a ship during a demonstration firing. Spectators wondered aloud what had happened after pieces of the missile flopped into the sea. | |
Some Russian analysts say the Kremlin is using the conflict in Syria to test a new generation of weaponry from a major procurement program that military officials began in 2010 after years of oil-boom profits. | |
“There are radars and all sorts of new control systems, and of course we need a firing range,” Konstantin V. Remchukov, the editor of Nezavisimaya Gazeta, told the Echo of Moscow radio station this week. | |
“We carried out a lot of exercises,” Mr. Remchukov said. “But a firing range like that opening before us in Syria, with these bombing sorties, with drones and other objects of the new generation, this is, of course, a favorable place for fine-tuning all our new weaponry.” | |
Russia has always supported Mr. Assad. But its direct entry into the conflict over the past few weeks has upended the battlefield in Syria — where more than four years of war have left a quarter of a million people dead and half the country displaced. | |
The focus of the newly intensified and coordinated campaign has been in an area straddling the provinces of Idlib and Hama, where insurgent gains in recent months seem to have spurred the increased Russian intervention. Moscow’s involvement also has given a new infusion of morale to the government. | |
The insurgent groups in the area struck by Russian forces on Thursday did not include the Islamic State, which Russia and the United States vow to defeat as it seeks to entrench its self-declared caliphate farther east in Syria and Iraq. | |
Rather, the groups are led by an Islamist coalition called Army of Conquest. That group includes Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, and while its main declared goal is ousting Mr. Assad, its member groups also clash with the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. | |
The State Department said Thursday that Secretary of State John Kerry had spoken by phone with his Russian counterpart, Sergey V. Lavrov, to express concern over Russia’s targets. | |
“The secretary raised his concerns about the fact that the preponderance of the targets that they’re striking are not against ISIL,” said John Kirby, a State Department spokesman, at a regular daily briefing. | |
Opponents of Mr. Assad, including the United States, argue that Russia’s approach will only strengthen the Islamic State by leaving no other alternative to Mr. Assad, whose crackdown on political protests helped set off the insurgency. |