With its air offensive and high-precision missile strikes from naval units located thousands of kilometers away in the Caspian and the Mediterranean seas, Russia eliminated hundreds of extremists and destroyed more than eight thousand strategic targets of the terrorist infrastructure.
The actions, which started on last September 30th at the request of constitutional government in Damascus and in coordination with Syrian ground troops, led to disabling training camps, arsenals, and plants weapons and explosives.
As a result, according to IHS, the Syrian Armed Forces and part of the opposition fighting the terrorism forced the terrorists to give up some 12,800 square kilometers in the northern Syrian border with Turkey.
The source said that among other locations, the terrorists left the city of Tikrit and a large part of the route linking Raqqa and Mosul, which makes difficult supplying and mobilizing extremists in that region.
Moreover, with its satellite intelligence and aerial observation, Moscow demonstrated to the international public that smuggling of oil and its derivatives through Turkey is the main source of terrorist financing, whose infrastructure it virtually destroyed.
Given this evidence, the international coalition that has been attacking Syria for the last year and a half without authorization neither from UN nor Damascus, primarily with the aim to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad, was forced to step up its actions against the terrorists.
The source concludes that the territory occupied by the extremist forces still exceeds 78,000 square kilometers in Syria and Iraq.
However, there is certainty that the siege against international terrorism is tightening, especially prompted by the actions of the Kremlin, which insists on leading this battle under the aegis of the United Nations and based of the principles of international law.
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PL-16/MNA