Dozens dead in US-led strikes on Daesh-run prison
Syrian president visits Russian air base
BEIRUT, Lebanon: US-led coalition airstrikes killed nearly 60 people at a Syrian prison run by Daesh, a monitor said Tuesday, as Washington insisted the terrorists remain its only target.
The coalition has been hitting Daesh in Syria and Iraq since mid-2014 but has also been involved in recent confrontations with President Bashar Assad’s forces, raising fears of the US being drawn into Syria’s civil war.
Monday’s strikes hit a Daesh-run jail in Syria’s Mayadeen at dawn, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based war monitor.
Observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP the strikes killed 42 prisoners and 15 militants in Mayadeen, a large town in the eastern province of Deir Ezzor.
Col. Ryan Dillon, spokesman for the US-led coalition, said: “With every single allegation we will take it and look into it.
“If we are responsible for any civilian casualties we come forth and admit it,” he said. He said Observatory reporting had previously been exaggerated.
Most of Deir Ezzor province is controlled by the extremists and it has been the target of airstrikes by both the coalition and the Syrian army and its Russian ally.
The US-led coalition said last week that it had killed top Daesh cleric Turki Binali in a May 31 strike on Mayadeen.
Daesh is believed to have moved most of its leaders to Mayadeen in Syria’s Euphrates Valley, southeast of the group’s besieged capital Raqqa, two US intelligence officials have said.
Among the operations moved to Mayadeen, about 80 km west of the Iraqi border, were its online propaganda operation and its limited command and control of attacks in Europe and elsewhere, they said.
In a separate development, Syrian President Bashar Assad visited a Russian air base at Hmeymim in western Syria on Tuesday, his first visit to the base from which Russian jets have supported his war effort.
Photos circulated showed the Syrian leader in the cockpit of a Russian Sukhoi SU-35 warplane, and inspecting an armored vehicle at the base near Latakia. He was accompanied by Russian chief of staff Gen. Valery Gerasimov, state news agency SANA reported.
The base has been at the heart of Moscow’s military effort in support of Assad since 2015, when the Russian air force began bombing insurgents who were threatening his grip on power. Assad has also been backed in the war by Iran.
Assad has been touring areas north of Damascus in recent days, a rare trip out of his seat of power in the capital. On Sunday he performed Eid prayer in the city of Hama, the first time he has visited the city since the start of the conflict.
State media also reported on Tuesday that Assad had visited wounded soldiers in the Hama countryside, accompanied by his wife Asma and children in footage screened by state media.