Russian Navy Launches Cruise Missiles Against ‘ISIS Targets’

Dagestan missile ship and other vessels from the Russian 

Navy’s Caspian Flotilla. (Russian Defense Ministry)

   Russia’s military campaign in Syria took a new turn Wednesday when four warships fired 26 cruise missiles at what the defense ministry said were Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS/ISIL) targets including three training camps in northern Syria.

   The development came amid continuing allegations that the majority of targets hit during Russia’s week-old airstrike campaign are associated with rebels groups other than ISIS.

   NATO commented Tuesday on an increase of Russian naval assets in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, but when the Russian Navy entered the campaign it did so from the south-western part of the landlocked Caspian Sea, some 1,000 miles to the north-east.

   Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu reported to President Vladimir Putin that all 11 “ISIS targets” had been destroyed, and that no civilian facilities had been hit, according to a transcript released by the Kremlin.

   Putin said, “The fact that these strikes were carried out using high-precision weapons launched from the Caspian Sea’s waters, around 1,500 kilometers away, and all of the planned targets were destroyed is evidence of our defense industry’s good preparation and the service personnel’s good professional skills.”

   Briefing reporters, Colonel General Andrei Kartapolov of the Russian armed forces general staff said the decision to use long-range cruise missiles was made after reconnaissance identified important targets.

   He said they included terrorist training camps in the Aleppo, Idlib and Raqqa regions, as well as command posts and ammunition manufacturing and storage sites. Each target had been carefully analyzed, based on aerial and satellite reconnaissance, communications intercepts and data collected by Syria, Iran and Iraq.

   (Russia, Iran, Iraq and the Assad regime recently established an intelligence-sharing center in Baghdad.)

   Kartapolov said Russia’s “partners” had given the go-ahead in advance for the use of the weaponry. He did not elaborate, but missiles traveling from the south-western Caspian Sea to Syria would overfly Iran and Iraq.

   The ministry said the missiles launched from the four Caspian Flotilla vessels – Dagestan, Grad Sviyazhsk, Uglich and Veliky Ustyug – were Kalibr NK cruise missiles, accurate to within nine feet of their target. They fly at low altitudes, about 160 feet, following the terrain.

   The Russian general also said flight paths were chosen to avoid populated areas.

   The U.S. and NATO have both expressed concern about civilian casualties in the Russian airstrikes. On Wednesday, Physicians for Human Rights reported that three medical facilities in Syria were hit in Russian airstrikes on Friday and Saturday.

   It said the three – a field hospital in northern Hama governorate, an ambulance depot and emergency response center in rural Idlib, and a hospital in northern Latakia – were each more than 30 miles away from the nearest ISIS-controlled territory.

   “Regardless of location or who the medical staff treat, targeting a medical facility is a war crime,” said PHR. The advocacy group says it has documented more than 300 attacks on medical facilities and the deaths of 670 medical personnel since the civil war began – 90 percent of them attributed to Syrian government forces.

   Russia denies hitting civilian targets.

   “Not a single civilian facility has been hit by our aviation in Syria,” Aerospace Forces commander-in-chief Colonel General Viktor Bondarev told a briefing Wednesday.

   The air group reported that 112 airstrikes had been carried out between Sept. 30 and Wednesday – and that they had targeted ISIS facilities. In his report to Putin Wednesday, Shoigu referred to the targets as “ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra, and other terrorist groups present on Syrian territory.”

   But State Department spokesman John Kirby said Wednesday that “greater than 90 percent of the strikes that we’ve seen them take to date have not been against ISIL or al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists.”

   “They’ve been largely against opposition groups that want a better future for Syria and don’t want to see the Assad regime stay in power,” he told a daily briefing.

   Also Wednesday, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutolu said that only two out of 57 Russian airstrikes had targeted ISIS, while the rest had been against opposition groups which are themselves fighting ISIS in northwestern Syria.