US, Russia military hotlines humming
ALUDEID AIRBASE: Even as tensions between the US and Russia fest er, there is one surprising place where their military-to-military contacts are quietly weathering the storm: Syria.
It has been four months since US President Donald Trump ordered cruise missile strikes against a Syrian airfield after an alleged chemical weapons attack.
In June, the US military shot down a Syrian fighter jet, the first US downing of a manned jet since 1999, and also shot down two Iranian-made drones that threatened US-led coalition forces.
All the while, US and Russian military officials have been regularly communicating, US officials told Reuters. Some of the contacts are helping draw a line on the map that separates US-and Russ ian-backed force swaging par al-- lel campaigns on Syria’s shrinking battlefields.
There is also a telephone hotline linking the former Cold War foes’ air operations centres. US officials said there now are about 10 to 12 calls a day on the hotline, helping keep US and Russian warplanes apart as they support different fighters on the ground.
That is no small task, given the complexities of Syria’s civil war. Moscow backs the Syrian government, which also is aided by Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah as it claws back territory from Syrian rebels and Islamic State fighters.
The US military is backing a collection of Kurdish and Arab forces focussing their firepower against Islamic State, part of a strategy to collapse the group’s self-declared“caliphate” in Syria and Iraq.