In a letter to the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) member states in their meeting for discussing security and intelligence issues in Moscow on Wednesday, President Putin stressed that the current geopolitical situation calls for new and effective ways to respond to the current challenges and threats.
In turn, Director of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB) Alexander Bortnikov, who attended the meeting, said that 40 per cent of the terrorists fighting in Syria had come from over 100 countries, with 10 terrorist groups with members coming from Russia, Ukraine, and other countries of Central Asia.
He said terrorists who are returning from hot zones pose a threat on the CIS countries as they had received training in combat and the use of weapons and explosives, and they are attempting to establish combat cells that can commit vandalism and sabotage attacks.
In the latest development in Syrian crisis, groups of ISIL terrorists, most of them of foreign nationalities, infiltrated in the past few hours Um al-Janayen village and the farms surrounding al-Sfeira city in southeastern Aleppo province in an attempt to control it. The army units in the area confronted the terrorists, leaving dozens of them dead and destroying several of tanks and vehicles they used in their attack, field sources told SANA on Wednesday. The sources said terrorists were carrying cameras and communications devices to communicate with the tendentious TV channels, which have claimed al-Sfeira city fell in the terrorists' hands.
Meanwhile, a military source said the army units defending the Air Force Academy destroyed vehicles for ISIL terrorists and fired at their gatherings in the surroundings of the Academy. An army unit, in cooperation with the popular defense groups, killed numbers of ISIL terrorists and destroyed their weapons and equipment in operations against their gatherings to the east of al-Sfeira city. ISIL terrorists in Khanaser-Atherya axis in the southeastern countryside near Hama province were targeted, with a number of them getting killed and their vehicles getting destroyed.
The army's operations in Aleppo city targeted terrorist positions in the neighborhoods of Salah Eddin, al-Lairamoun and al-Azamiyeh. The army also targeted terrorists from Jabhat al-Nusra and the so-called "Ahrar al-Sham Islamic Movement" and "Nour Eddin al-Zanki Movement" in Khan al-Assal and near Bashkoui village in northwestern Aleppo. A number of vehicles, some equipped with machineguns, were destroyed in the operations.
SANA/MNA