Russia sends missiles to Syria
Russia has deployed antiaircraft missiles in Syria to protect its warplanes carrying out airstrikes against militants, the head of the Russian air force disclosed Thursday.
The missiles were dispatched to territory under the control of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government to protect against “all possible threats,” Col. Gen. Viktor Bondarev said in an interview with the daily newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda.
“We sent … not only fighter jets, attack aircraft, bomber aircraft, helicopters but also missile systems, as various force majeure circumstances may occur,” Bondarev said. “There can be different emergencies, such as hijacking a jet on the territory of a neighboring country or an attack on it. We should be ready for this,” he said.
“ISIS are a very mobile gathering of rabble,” Bondarev said of the Islamic State fighters whom the Kremlin says it is targeting with its Syria intervention. “They use cars, motorbikes, bicycles and donkeys to move around and change their positions after every strike. You can’t effectively chase them with tanks, trucks and armored vehicles. Aviation is a different story.”
Retaliation by Islamist militants for Russia’s involvement in the multinational air campaign against Islamic State is one theory on the breakup of a Russian charter jet. The Metrojet Airbus A321 exploded Saturday over Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula about 20 minutes after taking off from the Sharm el Sheik tourist resort on the Red Sea en route to St. Petersburg.
Intelligence sources speaking anonymously have reported in Washington and London that crash investigators examining the aircraft’s flight-data and cockpit voice recorders suspect that the plane carrying 224 people was destroyed by a bomb.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and his Egyptian counterpart, Sameh Shoukry, spoke by telephone Thursday about the investigation of the disaster and cautioned against drawing conclusions on the cause of the plane’s destruction until the inquiry is completed, the Tass news agency reported. The diplomats said such speculation was “counterproductive.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin announced in late September that the Kremlin was sending warships and attack aircraft to Syria, purportedly to contain Islamic State and other militants controlling large areas of northern Syria. Western governments, however, have accused Putin of targeting rebel militias that have been fighting to oust Kremlin ally Assad for nearly five years.