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Syria and Russia Continue Coordinated Assault on Militants Russia Denies U.S. Claim That Missiles Aimed at Syria Hit Iran
(about 11 hours later)
BEIRUT, Lebanon — In a second day of a coordinated air and ground assaults in Syria, Russian warplanes, Syrian troops and their militia allies attacked insurgents on Thursday in a contested area of Hama Province, next to Syria’s coastal mountains, a critical government stronghold. 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.
The attacks, reported by insurgents and by a monitoring group, came as the Syrian Army’s chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Ali Abdullah Ayoub, declared sweeping goals for the new offensive via state-run news media, saying that government forces would capitalize on the Russian airstrikes with “a wide-scale attack” aimed at rooting out insurgents, “liberating the areas and towns which have been suffering the woes and crimes of terrorism.” 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.
Russia’s entry 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 — giving a new infusion of morale to the government and deepening the Russian alliance in Syria with President Bashar al-Assad, Iran and the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah. 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.
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. 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 insurgent groups there do 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 officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss military intelligence.
Opponents of Mr. Assad’s, 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. In contrast, Russia argues, much like the Syrian government, there are no meaningful distinctions between the Islamic State and most other insurgent groups, making them all legitimate targets. 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.
The new attacks on Thursday — reported by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group in Britain with extensive contacts in Syria — took place on the Ghab Plain, where the Army of Conquest had advanced in July, pushing south after seizing most of Idlib Province. Mr. Carter warned, “In coming days, the Russians will begin to suffer casualties.”
Insurgents in the Ghab Plain also include relatively secular groups who consider themselves part of the loose-knit Free Syrian Army, including some elements covertly equipped by the C.I.A. with advanced antitank missiles that have aided the recent Army of Conquest advances. 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.
The United States has objected to Russia’s targeting such groups; Russian officials have said they have asked the Americans for the coordinates of armed groups fighting the Islamic State but have not received any. Some fighters with rebel groups that have received American aid even say, after several were hit by Russian strikes, that they have begun to worry that the Americans did hand over their coordinates — and that the Russians were using the data to target them. “This was the first operational test of these in operational conditions,” one official said of the Russian Kalibrs.
The dispute puts the United States in the awkward position of either acquiescing to Russia’s attacks on the groups or objecting to them, even though the factions fight alongside a Qaeda affiliate. 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.
American warplanes flying over Syria have begun to alter their flight paths as necessary to avoid “unsafe” proximity to Russian fighters, the Pentagon said on Wednesday. Capt. Jeff Davis of the Navy told reporters that the United States had good awareness of the skies over Syria and had begun rerouting its airstrikes to pass well clear of the Russians. But there have been no direct communications between the two countries’ militaries since a video conference last week, he said. 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.
“We have taken some actions to ensure the safe separation of aircraft,” Captain Davis said. 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.”
Thursday’s clashes were slightly west of the ground fighting on Wednesday, in which insurgents said that — with the help of the antitank missiles — they had managed to stop a pro-government ground advance around three villages in Hama on the approach to the mountainous rebel-held territory of Jabal al-Zawiya. He also chastised Mr. Carter for his statement about Russian casualties, describing it as cynical and inappropriate.
Russian and Syrian airstrikes also continued for a second day in Al Bab and other areas of eastern Aleppo Province, undisputed Islamic State territory. “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.”
In his remarks, General Ayoub, the Syrian Army commander, also apparently sought to play down the notion that Russia had taken over the war, saying that Syrian armed forces had “kept the reins of military initiative” by forming a new strike force called the Fourth Assault Corps. 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.