More ‘firepower’ at Russian base as bombers pound Syria

Putin signals Syria progress with US, lashes Turkey

HMEIMIM AIRBASE, Syria, Dec 17, (Agencies): A fully armed Sukhoi-24 bomber roared deafeningly down the runway at Russia’s Hmeimim base in Syria and took off into the sky over the war-torn country.

Within a few minutes another jet laden with bombs hurtled along the tarmac after it and followed up towards the clouds. Then another, and another.

“From the time the pilot gets the order to when the plane takes off and the target is destroyed -- all that is normally completed in just some thirty minutes,” spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov said as he looks at another plane gearing up for a mission.

“If the objective is in Deir Ezzor province then it can take some 25 minutes to get there, if it’s near Idlib, then just 10,” Konashenkov told AFP as part of a tightly controlled press trip to Hmeimim organised by the defence ministry in Moscow.

Almost three months after Russia started its bombing campaign in Syria at the request of President Bashar al-Assad there seemed little sign of it letting up at Moscow’s sprawling facility deep in the strongman’s heartland.

Russia’s military said Wednesday its jets had carried out 59 sorties and destroyed some 212 targets in the past 24 hours, adding to the roughly 9,000 training camps, munition depots, command posts and oil refineries they claim to have taken out overall.

In a sign that it remains in an unrelenting mood, Moscow has also bolstered its firepower at the base to protect its aircraft over Syria after a Turkish F-16 shot down one of its fighter jets along the Syrian border on Nov 24.

At one end of the runway the radars of the most modern air defence system Russia’s army possesses -- the S-400 -- rotated next to some half-dozen vast missile firing tubes.

President Vladimir Putin ordered the system to Syria in the days after the incident, and the defence ministry claims they rushed them over in hours.

“After they shot down our SU-24 plane the command was given and they were set up as quickly as possible,” the commander of the air defence system told

AFP, without giving his name.

The system can track some 300 targets and shoot down around three dozen simultaneously over a range of hundreds of kilometres, the military said.

Meanwhile, Putin said on Thursday he broadly supported US plans to try to push forward the Syria peace process, but signalled in an angry attack that he was in no mood to forgive Turkey for shooting down a Russian warplane.

Addressing almost 1,400 reporters in a cavernous hall inside a Moscow conference centre, the Russian leader said he generally backed a US plan to prepare a UN resolution on Syria even though differences between Moscow and Washington remained.

But he signalled Moscow was not yet ready to withdraw its support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, saying a new constitution needed to be drawn up and elections held to determine the fate of the

conflict-torn country.

“We believe that only the Syrian people can decide who should govern them,” Putin told an annual news conference, saying Moscow would continue its air strikes in Syria for as long as the Syrian army continued its own military operations.

His comments followed a visit to Moscow by US Secretary of State John Kerry this week and come on the eve of a meeting of world powers in New York on Friday to discuss Syria.

Syrian rebels debunked reports of receiving aid from Moscow, after Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday that his air force has been supporting opposition factions battling jihadists.

Putin, in his annual news conference, said Russia had “found contacts” among Syrian rebel groups fighting the Islamic State jihadist group and was backing

them with air strikes.

But Arab rebel groups denied the account.

Asaad Hanna, a member of the Northern Division rebel alliance’s political office, told AFP the claim was “categorically a lie”.

The Northern Division is a newlyformed rebel coalition that is part of the loose network of Free Syrian Army (SLA) groups in northern Syria. It is both anti-regime and anti-IS.

“With these statements, the (Russian) government is trying to create a split within the Free Syrian Army by broadcasting rumours about working with the Russians,” Hanna told AFP.

Russia has been conducting a nearly three-month air war in Syria in support of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

Last week, Putin said Russia was backing some 5,000 members of the FSA with weapons and air strikes.