Russian jets hit ISIS targets in Palmyra, Aleppo

Russian jets hit ISIS targets in the Syrian city of Palmyra and the northern province of Aleppo, Syrian state television and a monitoring group said on Tuesday, in some of the heaviest Russian attacks on the hardline Islamist group.

The strikes destroyed 20 vehicles and three weapons depots in ISIS-held Palmyra, state television said, quoting a military source. In Aleppo, they hit the towns of Al-Bab and Deir Hafer, about 20 km east of a military airport currently besieged by ISIS fighters.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based group tracking Syria's civil war, said the Palmyra strikes killed 15 ISIS fighters. "It was the heaviest Russian attack on Palmyra," Observatory director Rami Abdulrahman said. Across Syria, Russian jets carried out at least 34 air strikes in the last 24 hours, the Observatory said. Another four ISIS fighters were killed near Raqqa, the eastern city which has been the group's stronghold in Syria for the last two years.

Al-Manar television, run by the Lebanese Hezbollah group which is allied to President Bashar al-Assad, said Russian planes also carried out four raids in the Jabal al-Zawiya area in the northwestern province of Idlib.

ISIS forces captured Palmyra in May, an advance which brought them closer to the core of government-held territory in western Syria. It also put the city's Roman-era ruins under the militants' control. Syria's antiquities chief Maamoun Abdulkarim said on Sunday ISIS fighters blew up Palmyra's Arch of Triumph, one of the most treasured monuments in the 2,000-year-old city. They had already destroyed temples and other antiquities.

Russia has carried out dozens of strikes in Syria since launching its air campaign last Wednesday. While Moscow has said its intervention targets the hardline ISIS fighters who control much of eastern and northern Syria, many of the Russian strikes so far have hit rival insurgent forces opposed to Assad.

Russia said on Saturday it would step up it air strikes in Syria, where a US-led coalition of Western and Arab forces has been waging a year-long air campaign againstISIS and across the border in neighbouring Iraq. So far, according to Russian defence ministry statements, it has carried out roughly 20 sorties per day. 

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