Syrian warplanes have carried out one of their most intense series of airstrikes in weeks against the ancient city of Palmyra, on the outskirts of the strategically important central city of Tadmur, killing at least 38 ISIS fighters. Attacks continued for hours.
ISIS captured Palmyra and Tadmur back in mid-May, and while most of the focus has been on the danger ISIS poses to the antiquities in Palmyra, the capture of the area has given them a corridor through which to attack deeper west and deeper south into the country.
The latest round of airstrikes likely reflects Syria’s military growing emboldened by the receipt of new warplanes from Russia, allowing them more freedom to carry out airstrikes than they’d previously been able to with the remnants of their air force.
Syria has lost some of its most important air bases in recent weeks, but Russian specialists along the Latakian coast have been expanding the air fields there. With the Syrian military mostly losing conflicts on the ground, relying on air power is becoming one of the few ways they can keep ISIS at bay.
The number should reeds 3800 of these iligitimate sons of Saudis regimes, illegitimate sons of Kings and queens that were kept a life both in Europe and elsewhere for such moments in mankind history. This is 2015 mankind is about to travel to meet the Martian yet the civilized world, as they call themselves, still feeding barbarism and such civilization-democracy is in bed with the roots of a corrupted rotten system that produce barbarism.
The last sentence is the important point: Assad is getting desperate and is lashing out wildly with whatever he has to hand. Jet fighters are too crude a weapon for anti-insurgency work. The just set off big bangs and kill lots of people, some of whom may be in surgents, but most of whom aren't. The lesson of Vietnam: you need nimble helicopter gunships or relatively slow-moving attack aircraft to deal with insurgents. Assad has none. Putin has none to give him.
Actually, Assad has five squadrons of dedicated attack helicopters and seven squadrons of transport helicopters that can be deployed as attack helicopters and/or gunships. But you've never let facts get in the way of reaching the conclusions you want to reach before, so why start now?