The U.S. Department of Defense has just tweeted this photo of U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter shortly after his arrival in Afghanistan this morning.
Germany's spy agency is working again with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's secret service to swap information on Islamist militants, the Bild daily said, despite Berlin's opposition to Assad staying in power under any peace deal in Syria, Reuters reports.
The aim of renewed BND contacts with Damascus is to exchange information about militants, especially those in Islamic State, and to set up a fixed communication channel in case a German Tornado pilot is downed over Syria, Bild said.
Russia's Defense Ministry says that the results from the deciphering the flight recorder from the downed Su-24 jet will be announced on December 21.
Turkey downed the Russian jet on November 24 near the Syrian border, claiming that the Su-24 had violated its air space. Russia has insisted that its jet had remained in Syrian air space. At a press briefing at the Defense Ministry this morning, officials said that the Su-24's final flight had lasted 40 minutes.
The aim of the investigation into the flight recorder is to construct the flight path of the downed Su-24 jet, Russia's Defense Ministry says.
Suspected Russian air strikes have killed 32 civilians, half of them women and children, in three areas in northern Syria, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has said, AFP reports.
SOHR head Rami Abdel Rahman said warplanes bombarded Raqqa, IS's stronghold in Syria, as well as the towns of Azaz and Al-Bab in Aleppo province, on December 17.
Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad has said that Russian air strikes in Syria have "weakened the opportunities of IS and other terrorists groups to act."
Mekdad made his comments in an interview with pro-Kremlin news website RIA Novosti.
"I think that the result of the Russian actions is evident across all of Syria," Mekdad said.
"[Turkish President] Erdogan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar are trying to prove that they are different from [IS], at the same time as strikes by Russian jets are really weakening the terrorists, and this is evidenced by the numerous areas liberated in Hama, Latakia, Idlib and Aleppo. There are significant successes, and soon this will be even more noticeable."
Mekdad also praised Russia's deployment to Syria of its S-400 air defense systems, saying that this safeguarded the Russian air force and the Syrian army.
The Washington Post has more on U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter's visit to Afghanistan today, and on the growing threat posed by the IS group in that country, particularly in Nangahar province.
A senior defense official, speaking to reporters en route to Afghanistan on condition of anonymity, said the Islamic State presence was seen by Taliban leaders as a a threat and added a “new dynamic” to an already challenging situation.
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“Nangahar is the region that most distresses us now,” Gen. Dawlat Waziri, senior spokesman for the Afghan Ministry of Defense, said in an interview Thursday. He said Afghan forces had defeated [IS] in several other provinces and are now aggressively fighting them in four districts of Nangahar, where they have killed between 300 and 400 militants in recent months.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has given a wide-ranging interview to Dutch public broadcaster NOS.
A video of the interview is available on NOS's website this morning.
Syrian state news agency SANA has a transcript of the interview on its website.
On the issue of the U.S.-led coalition bombing IS targets in Syria, Assad said this was illegal without the permission of his government.
Assad: This is illegal. This is against the international law. We are a sovereign country. If you are serious about fighting terrorism, what is the obstacle for that government to call the Syrian government, to say “let’s cooperate in fighting terrorism?” The only obstacle is that the Western policy today towards Syria is “we need to isolate this state, that president, so we cannot deal with him.” Okay, you cannot reach anything then.
Assad was asked why he thought militants from countries like the Netherlands were going to fight alongside groups like IS in Syria.
Assad: The most important question is: why did you have them in Europe? Coming, that’s natural; when you have chaos, when Syria has been turned into a hotbed for terrorism because Europe and Turkey and Saudi Arabia and Qatar and those countries supported terrorists in different ways, of course you’re going to have chaos, and it’s going to be a nexus for terrorism. That’s natural for this, how to say, fertile soil, to attract terrorists from the rest of the world. But the question: why did you have them in Europe? You didn’t deal with terrorism in a realistic base.
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I think it’s about two things, if you ask me about why. First of all, the European governments didn’t do their job to integrate these people in their societies; they lived in a ghetto. When you live in a ghetto, you’re going to be an extremist. The second one, many European officials have sold their values for the petrodollar, and they allowed the Wahabi Saudi institutions to pay money and to bring this dark and this extremist ideology to Europe, and that’s why now you are exporting terrorists to us. We don’t export, actually, they came to Syria, and then they go back to Europe.
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And the three criminals who committed the attacks in Paris, all of them lived in Europe; Belgium and France and others. They didn’t live in Syria
Syrian Deputy FM: Erdogan 'Selling Syrian & Iraqi Oil'
By accusing Syria of buying oil from the IS group, Turkish President Erdogan is "trying to remove a shadow from his own family," Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad has said.
In an interview this morning with pro-Kremlin news agency RIA Novosti, Mekdad said Turkey was "distorting the picture" regarding IS oil sales.
Erdogan and his family were "working with Syrian and Iraqi oil, selling it on the Turkish internal market and in several other countries. We are ready to throw [Erdogan] a challenge -- let him present just one piece of evidence for his words," Mekdad said.
Mekdad said that Damascus was buying oil as needed from "friendly states" including Iran, which was sending three oil tankers via sea to Syria every month.