Amnesty International Report 'Cliches & Fakes' - Russian Defense Ministry
TASS has more on the Russian Defense Ministry's response to the Amnesty International report that says Russian air strikes caused civilian casualties in Syria.
Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said that the report consists of "fakes and cliches."
"We familiarized ourselves with the report -- again nothing concrete and nothing new has been published. The same cliches and fakes that we have repeatedly denounced before. The report uses the same phrases like "presumed Russian air strikes" and "possible violations of international law" and so on. That is, total assumptions without any kind of proof," Konashenkov said.
Konashenkov said that Russia was not using cluster bombs in Syria.
Army Col. Steve Warren, the spokesman for the U.S.-led anti-IS operations in Syria, has tweeted this before-and-after image of an IS oil depot near IS's Syrian stronghold of Raqqa, which was destroyed in U.S.-led air strikes.
Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said Russia made "disingenuous propaganda shows" with the black box flight recorder recovered from the downed Su-24 jet.
Turkey shot down the Russian jet near the Syrian border on November 24.
"It was stated that the black box was opened, but the information was unreadable due to the destruction," Erdogan said, according to the Daily Sabah.
"At a time when all the world has accepted Turkey's rightfulness, these disingenuous propaganda shows do not have any meaning beyond further embarrassing those who seek help from them."
Three IS suicide attacks killed 11 pro- government fighters in Syria in the eastern city of Deir al-Zor today, according to Rami Abdel-Rahman, head of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
IS controls about half of Deir al-Zor city. Abdel-Rahman said that the suicide attacks allowed IS to advance slightly in the city but Russian and Syrian war planes are striking their positions.
However, state news agency SANA is reporting that government forces managed to push back IS militants and that the suicide car bombs had exploded before they reached military posts in the al-Sinaa neighborhood of Deir al-Zor.
From our news desk:
Pro-Kurdish Turkish Leader Visits Moscow
The leader of Turkey's pro-Kurdish opposition party has criticized Ankara for shooting down a Russian warplane last month.
Selahattin Demirtas, leader of the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), made the comment at talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Moscow on December 23.
His trip and the warm welcome he was given in Moscow are likely to unsettle Ankara following comments by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who said last week he saw no prospect of mending ties with Turkey's leadership.
Russia imposed economic sanctions on Turkey after the November 24 incident and has sharply criticized President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Erdogan has accused the HDP of connections with armed Kurdish rebels fighting in Turkey's southeast.
Lavrov told Demirtas that Russia was ready to cooperate closely with ethnic Kurds fighting against Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria.
A Pennsylvania man, 19-year-old Jalil Ibn Ameer Aziz, is expected in court for a detention hearing and arraignment today, a day after a grand jury indicted him for allegedly trying to assist the IS group, advocating violence against American citizens and helping people travel to Syria.
Prosecutors say Aziz used Twitter to spread IS propaganda and had a bag with ammunition.
Two residents of Ingushetia in the North Caucasus have been declared wanted for participating in fighting in Syria, RIA Novosti reports.
RIA reports that the two men -- a 27 and 29 year old -- are from the Sunzha district of Ingushetia and went to Syria no later than April 2013 and joined the Jaish al-Muhajireen wal-Ansar (JMA) militant group.
RIA's headline says that the two men are allegedly fighting alongside IS, though it then names the group they joined as JMA.
In April 2013, when the two men allegedly went to Syria, JMA was led by Umar Shishani, an ethnic Chechen from the Pankisi Gorge in Georgia who later defected to the IS group late in 2013, taking some militants with him. JMA disbanded in September this year when its leaders and most of its fighters joined the Syrian affiliate of Al-Qaeda, the Al-Nusra Front.
AFP reports on the fate of some of the civilians who had been trapped in the Iraqi city of Ramadi.
Some 50 families the IS group had been using as human shields in Ramadi managed to escaped to safety today, AFP reports, as Iraqi forces closed in on the militants' last strongholds in the city center.
Iraqi forces backed by close air support from the U.S.-led coalition have been moving toward the government complex in the center of Ramadi.
"Ramadi residents who were held by Daesh (IS) in the city centre escaped the siege and went towards the military units in Tal Mshahideh" in eastern Ramadi, provincial council spokesman Eid Ammash al-Karbuli told AFP.
He said thew were mostly children, women and elderly men who raised white flags as they approached the security forces.
Russia's Defense Ministry tweets that a Su-34 jet has carried out a strike on the Syrian ultraconservative rebel group Ahrar al-Sham in Aleppo province.
While Russia initially said that it was targeting IS in Syria, more recently the Russian media and now the Defense Ministry have said that other groups are being targeted. Pro-Kremlin news website RIA Novosti refers to strikes against IS and Al-Qaeda's Syrian affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra.
Bouthaina Shaaban, a close adviser to Syrian President Bashar Assad told Beirut-based al-Mayadeen television today that Damascus was ready to join U.N.-sponsored peace talks, Reuters reports.
Shaaban said her government approved of U.N. resolutions passed last week endorsing an international road map for a Syria peace process.
"We accept these resolutions," she said in the first official Syrian remarks on the matter.