“The designated targets were hit by direct impacts,” he further indicated, adding that these exercises, which involved more than a thousand soldiers, ten ships and 24 planes, were planned in advance.
Russia is one of President Bashar al-Assad’s main allies and has a naval base and an air base in Syria, where it has intervened militarily since 2015.
Rebel groups led by the radical Islamists of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, dominated by the former Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda, launched an offensive against the Syrian army last week, quickly seizing dozens of localities as well as a large part of the country’s second city, Aleppo.
These clashes are the first of this magnitude for several years in Syria, where hostilities had generally ceased between the belligerents supported by different regional and international powers with divergent interests in this devastating war started in 2011.
