Militants kill 2 soldiers in attack on Russian air base in Syria
Militants attacked a Russian air base in Syria, killing two soldiers, a Syrian government official and a local activist said Wednesday.
They said that the two militants who launched the attack Tuesday on the Hmeimim air base on Syria's coast were also killed. Both spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation.
The Syrian official said that it was unclear whether the two people killed at the base were Russian soldiers or Syrian contractors. Russia's ministry of defense did not respond to a request for comment. The Syrian government has given no official statement on the incident.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based war monitor, reported that at least three people were killed in the attack but that it had been unable to determine if they were attackers or Russian forces. It said the attackers were believed to be foreign fighters affiliated with the new Syrian defense forces.
The government official said the two militants who were killed were foreign nationals who had worked as military trainers at a naval college that was training members of the new government's military. He said they had acted on their own in attacking the base and were not officially affiliated with any faction.
The new Syrian government, which has been trying to build its diplomatic ties, has been under pressure by the United States and other countries to deal with the ranks of foreign Islamist fighters who joined the armed opposition to Assad and who are often seen as having more extreme and fundamentalist views than their Syrian counterparts.
The local activist said he had heard clashes in the area around the base, including both gunfire and shelling. Videos shared on social media showed smoke rising from behind a building at the base amid the sound of gunshots.
Former Syrian President Bashar Assad, who fell in a lightning rebel offensive in December, was a close ally of Russia. Moscow's scorched-earth intervention in support of Assad once turned the tide of Syria's civil war, and since his ouster, he has been granted asylum in Russia.
But the former insurgents leading Syria's transitional government since Assad's fall have maintained relations with Moscow and have not forced a complete exit of Russian military forces from bases in Syria.
In March, when clashes between pro-Assad armed groups and the new government security forces spiraled into sectarian attacks on civilians from the Alawite religious minority to which Assad belongs, thousands of Alawite civilians took refuge in the Hmeimim base, many of whom have remained there.
On Tuesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov publicly condemned what he called 'ethnic cleansing' in Syria but did not mention the reported attack on the air base.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Daily Mail
16 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE A bright yellow minibus, a force 9 gale in the Baltic and a gang of heavies with Kalashnikovs: how MI6 extracted a KGB colonel and double agent from under the Russians' noses - with his wife, son and senile mother-in-law in tow
Even with decades of experience between them, the two middle-aged spies were on edge. They were about to attempt something that had never been done before in the history of MI6. Instead of smuggling out one Russian spy to a new life in Britain – the more usual scenario – they were going to extract an entire family.
Telegraph
20 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Hamas fighters smash kneecaps of Gazan ‘food thief'... then post video
Hamas fighters have been filmed torturing a man alleged to have stolen food in Gaza. The graphic footage, circulating on social media accounts linked to the terror group, shows several figures standing over a blindfolded man as they use a metal bar to break his knees. The video comes as the terror group attempts to retain control of Gaza. Statements on Hamas -linked channels report multiple 'executions' of Gazans for taking food in recent days. The Strip was under a total blockade from the beginning of March until late May. Reports indicate that parts of the civilian population are approaching starvation. Aid is being distributed from four purpose-built sites in and around the southern area of Rafah via a controversial US private contractor, but the project has got off to a shaky start with reports of chaotic scenes and multiple killings, allegedly by the IDF, which Israel says it is investigating. There are increasing reports of both criminal gangs and ordinary Gazans looting aid lorries and warehouses. Israel said that bypassing the previous aid model – whereby food and supplies would be delivered directly into communities, but was vulnerable to theft by Hamas – is crucial to breaking the terror group's hold over the population. In Tuesday's video, the blindfolded man screams and writhes in agony as his joints are struck multiple times. Other footage that surfaced in recent days appears to show summary killings of civilians. The evidence is not published via official Hamas accounts and is difficult to verify. But the footage is often accompanied by warnings purporting to be from the terror group. One prominent account stated on Tuesday that 'security forces pursued thieves, executed four of them, suppressed 16 others, and shot eight' in central Gaza in the past 48 hours. Others suggested six people had been killed across the Strip. A message said: 'To every thief, every agent, every exploiter, and highway robber... This is our final message before your files are sealed with bullets.' Similar statements speak of 'field sentences' for defiant civilians, many of whom are named on the Telegram social media channel. Last week, it emerged that Hamas militants kidnapped, tortured and killed 22-year-old Oldai Naser Saadi, one of the leaders of the anti-Hamas protest movement in Gaza. He was reportedly tortured for four hours. His body was then dumped at his family's home. Despite the chaos, the Israeli government has lauded the new aid distribution system, delivered by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, as crucial for breaking the 'fear barrier' among the population of Hamas. It is alleged that the terror group physically tried to prevent people from walking to collect aid as well as releasing propaganda against the GHF. The Telegraph has spoken to ordinary Gazans who say they are turning to theft of food from aid trucks because they are so hungry. During the height of the ceasefire in Jan and Feb, approximately 600 vehicles were entering the Strip each day. But figures suggest that over a 12-day period in late May the total number was just over 1,000.
The Guardian
31 minutes ago
- The Guardian
‘Five years from now, these readers will be soldiers': The Russian literature encouraging teens to enlist
'Z literature', a subgenre of Russian fantasy fiction characterised by nationalistic, pro-war storylines, has been on the rise since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine began three years ago and may be pushing young readers towards enlisting in combat. Z literature – named after the 'Z' symbol of support for the invasion – often features popadantsy, or 'accidental travel' narratives, involving a protagonist being transported to pivotal moments in Russia's past and using modern knowledge to intervene and alter history in Russia's favour. 'Providing a powerful strain of jingoistic nostalgia, these narratives satisfy readers' yearning for the lost superpower status by rewriting the past,' according to Mediazona, the independent Russian news outlet which reported on the boom in Z literature in May. Z literature is targeted at young men who will soon be the focus of enlistment drives, said Colin Alexander, a senior lecturer in political communications at Nottingham Trent University. 'In times of war, all countries will try to inspire those demographics targeted [for] soldiering through a range of propaganda strategies.' While news broadcasts are often focused on by propaganda researchers, 'the reality is that publics are most inspired to serve the war effort through storytelling entertainment media and that excites and inspires. Russia is certainly using these well-trodden wartime emotional propaganda techniques, but it is important to state that wherever there is war we tend to find them.' These 'Russian hyper-nationalistic genre novels with their outsize heroics are significant because they are made outside the formal propaganda apparatus of the state,' said Nicholas O'Shaughnessy, emeritus professor of communications at Queen Mary, University of London. 'They are pieces of individual entrepreneurship but highly predictable, as if from a common template.' While the books 'connect of course with Hollywood hyper heroics' such as Captain America, and the 'literature imbibed by Victorian British schoolboys' such as the novels of GA Henry, 'the difference lies in their crudeness and the extent of their hypernationalism which takes them into the realms of fantasy. They retain not one shred of credibility.' 'They offer a binary world of hateful foreigners and wonderful Russians – or at least, Russians who become great after learning the lessons of experience,' he said. Books falling in the Z literature subgenre, according to Mediazona, include Crimean Cauldron by Nikolai Marchuk, in which Ukrainians are portrayed as Nazis and the whole world has turned against Russia, and White Z on the Front Armour by Mikhail Mikheev, about a Russian agent who enters Ukraine after the full-scale invasion begins and apprehends a western spy. 'The market is clearly young and male, but what is stunning is the coarseness. It would be funny if it were not really real. [The books] are tapping into a terrible appetite for destruction, deep yearnings for revenge and a strange view of the Russians as a kind of herrenvolk, a unique people. One source of this mythology is the belief that second world war victory was almost entirely of Russian authorship,' said O'Shaughnessy. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion 'So these are master-race fantasies which to work require the diminution of other peoples, their subjugation – and arousing hatred is the lubricant for this.' Another example of Z literature, reported Mediazona, is PMC Chersonesus by Andrei Belyanin, a popadantsy story which sees a former marine on a mission to return artefacts to Crimea with a team resembling Aphrodite, Heracles and Dionysus. Along the way, they encounter other figures from Greek mythology and zombie Nazis. Their final mission involves stealing Scythian gold from the Netherlands – a plotline nodding to the real-life loaning of gold to an Amsterdam museum pre-annexation, which the Dutch supreme court ultimately decided should go to Ukraine, not Crimea. 'Five years from now, these readers will be soldiers,' Jaroslava Barbieri, a researcher at the University of Birmingham, told The Telegraph. 'The Kremlin isn't trying to appease aggression – it's cultivating it.' All healthy men aged between 18 and 30 must complete one year of service in the Russian military. Though conscripts in theory cannot serve on the frontlines, there have been reports of them signing combat contracts under duress.
