WORLD_ US Drones To Fly Over ISIS Areas In Syria -- Without Assad's Approval

BRIEFING

US Drones To Fly Over ISIS Areas In Syria -- Without Assad's Approval

Michael B Kelley
23 minutes ago
BUSINESS INSIDER AUSTRALIA




President Obama authorised sending surveillance aircraft, including drones, into Syrian airspace to gather intelligence on extremists ISIS militants, senior U.S. officials told The Wall Street Journal.

The flights are a further acknowledgment that the group also known as Islamic State (IS) is a threat beyond Iraq, and the operations would inform any decision to conduct airstrikes near the ISIS haven of Raqqa in eastern Syria.

Significantly, the missions will be carried out without coordination with or approval from the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Officials noted that regime “air-defence systems in eastern Syria won’t pose a threat because sensors are either sparsely located or inoperable,” WSJ reports.

ISIS militants have consolidated their grip on northeast Syria by capturing the Tabqa air base and other remaining regime-held military based in the Raqqa province.





Top U.S. military officials and experts have acknowledged that ISIS control of vast territory in Syria provides a safe haven for the group to conduct operations in both Syria and Iraq.

“If … conditions continue as they are, I believe the IS will largely expand the territory under its control in Syria,” Charles Lister of the Brookings Institution told Der Spiegel.

Air strikes on ISIS positions would signal a change of course in Obama’s Syria policy, which has been characterised by active non-involvement.

Paul Salem of the Middle East Institute notes that potential strikes “could have multiple effects: it would help protect the Kurds and ‘moderate’ opposition from major ISIS or Nusra attempts to conquer their territories; it would directly empower these opposition groups against their radical jihadi foes; and it would give a great boost of morale to these groups, many of whom had perhaps rightly concluded that they had been abandoned.”

Administration officials told the Guardian that the favoured long-term strategy to defeat ISIS is to train moderate Syrian rebels to fight both ISIS and the regime. But the non-jihadist rebels in the Free Syrian Army are now being decimated by both jihadists and the regime after years of being brushed aside as “former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth” by President Obama.

Follow Business Insider Australia on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn

***


Chân thành cám ơn Quý Anh Chị ghé thăm "conbenho Nguyễn Hoài Trang Blog".
Xin được lắng nghe ý kiến chia sẻ của Quý Anh Chị trực tiếp tại Diễn Đàn Paltalk: 1Latdo Tapdoan Vietgian CSVN Phanquoc Bannuoc . 
Kính chúc Sức Khỏe Quý Anh Chị . 



conbenho
Tiểu Muội quantu
Nguyễn Hoài Trang
26082014
___________
Cộng sản Việt Nam là TỘI ÁC
Bao che, dung dưỡng TỘI ÁC là đồng lõa với TỘI ÁC