Situation in Syria has improved after Russia had started its air campiagn, president Assad told SANA. "The situation in Syria has improved since the beginning of the Russian operation against terrorists," Bashar al-Assad said. "And now I can say that the [Syrian] army is making advancement on every front." [...]

The Russian fleet in the Caspian Sea has launched 18 cruise missiles, hitting seven terrorist targets in Syria on Friday, Russian Defense Minster Sergey Shoigu has reported to President Vladimir Putin. “On November 20, the warships of the Caspian Fleet launched 18 cruise missiles at seven targets in the provinces of Raqqa, Idlib and Aleppo. All targets were hit successfully,” he said. [...]

Around 500 fuel tanker vehicles transporting illegal oil from Syria to Iraq for processing have been destroyed by Russia’s Air Forces, the General Staff said. “In recent years, Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) and other extremist groups have organized the operations of the so-called ‘pipeline on wheels’ on the territories they control,” Russian General Staff spokesman Colonel Ge [...]

On the day Moscow officially confirmed a terrorist attack as the cause of last month’s downing of a passenger plane in Egypt, the Russian military hit over 200 terrorist targets in Syria in 127 sorties. The escalated Russian operation involved not only warplanes flying from an airfield near Latakia, but also strategic bombers operating from Russian territory. [...]

Russia has deployed its fleet of strategic bombers to double the volume of airstrikes on Islamist targets in Syria, Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu has announced. Vladimir Putin has ordered a cruiser to coordinate operations with French naval forces in the Mediterranean. [...]

The Russian military has launched airstrikes against the Islamic State stronghold of Raqqa in Syria with cruise missiles from their ships in the Mediterranean Sea, France’s Le Monde newspaper said, citing a French official. The information that Russia has struck Islamic State positions in Raqqa has been also reported by a senior French government source, cited by Reuters. [...]

In a rare interview with Russian media outlets, RT among them, Syrian leader Bashar Assad spoke about global and domestic terrorism threats, the need for a united front against jihadism, Western propaganda about the refugee crisis and ways to bring peace to his war-torn nation. [...]

As Syrian peace talks pick up speed, should we hope for any progress in ending the war? This conflict is a riddle, surely - as years go on, it becomes more and more difficult to sort out who’s fighting whom and for what purpose. And over that boiling pot of violence and blood, major powers – Russia, America, Gulf States, Iran – play their own game, no less convoluted, with goals and forces u [...]

Elite Syrian army units have broken the siege of Kweires airbase, following weeks of intense fighting against Islamic State and other jihadist forces. The base, which opens up routes for offensives against Raqqa and Aleppo, had been encircled for nearly two years. [...]

Amid intensifying U.S. military operations in Iraq and Syria, a group of 35 bipartisan House lawmakers issued an open letter on Friday calling for Congress to fulfill its responsibility by voting "as quickly as possible" on whether to authorize a war that is well over a year old. [...]

The US is not interested in defeating ISIS but would want to control its movements to create a geopolitical balance on the ground and provide the US-led coalition with leverage at the Vienna talks, said Middle East geopolitics analyst Sharmine Narwani. [...]

When I was a kid, three presidents told us we had to fight in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, because if we didn’t fight them over there, we’d have to fight them on the beaches of California. We believed. It was a lie. I was a teenager during the Cold War, and several presidents told us we needed to create massive stockpiles of nuclear weapons, garrison the world, invade Cuba, fight in odd litt [...]

Newly acquired documents show the Pentagon spent nearly $400 million, or $2 million per fighter, on its failed train-and-equip program, according to USA Today. The Pentagon claims the actual cost was $30,000 per trainee. [...]

Damascus is opposed to having US troops on its soil, thus the US is committing aggression and international crimes against the nation of Syria, says Daniel McAdams, executive director of the Ron Paul Institute. [...]

DOHA - Amidst the wilderness of mirrors surrounding the Syrian tragedy, a diamond-shaped fact persists: Despite so many degrees of separation, the Saudis are still talking to the Russians. Why? A key reason is because a perennially paranoid House of Saud feels betrayed by their American protectors who, under the Obama administration, seem to have given up on isolating Iran. [...]

Russian and US air forces have staged joint drills to practice air safety measures in the skies over Syria, according to the Russian General Staff, which also reported that its military has begun to coordinate with Syria’s moderate opposition forces. In the course of the drills, both the air crews and ground services of Russian and US forces drilled procedures aimed at avoiding problems in ca [...]

In a move that critics says fulfills long-held warnings of "mission creep" and amount to throwing "gasoline on a fire," the Obama administration on Friday announced that U.S. ground troops will now be deployed inside Syria. In strategic leaks to various media outlets, the Pentagon made clear the president's plan to send approximately 50 Special Operations soldiers inside the war-torn country. R [...]

I first came to the conclusion that the U.S. is a dictatorship in 2002, when I found proof that George W. Bush was lying to claim that he possessed proof that Saddam Hussein was rebuilding his WMD (weapons of mass destruction) stockpiles, and when the U.S. and UK ’news’ media hid this crucial fact that their heads-of-state were lying. [...]

The Russian Defense Ministry has denied media reports its aircraft hit hospitals in Syria, saying the medical facilities mentioned by Western media don’t actually exist. The Defense Ministry has checked the data presented in recent media reports, which blamed Russian aviation for hitting several hospitals in Syria, Major-General Igor Konashenkov, the ministry spokesman said in a press briefin [...]

Official Washington’s neocon-dominated “group think” on Syria is that everything is the fault of President Assad and Russian President Putin, but the actual history shows many missed opportunities for peace because of the U.S. obsession with dictating “regime change” in country after country, as Jonathan Marshall explains. [...]

Sending some 50 US advisers to Syria illegally to train the so-called ‘moderate rebels’ looks like a calculated move. If, or when, someone gets hurt, the US will have a pretext for boots on the ground, believes retired US Air Force Lieutenant Col Karen Kwiatkowski. Does this deployment mean Americans will be putting themselves in the direct line of fire in Syria? [...]

Obama’s decision to send Special Forces into Syria is being widely viewed as a US military escalation in the country. The troop dispatch also signals that the US trying to forestall Russian successes in wiping out Washington’s regime-change assets in Syria. In short, the US Special Forces are being used as “human shields” to curb Russian air strikes against anti-government mercenaries, [...]