Syria warns against strikes on Islamic State on its soil

Syria warns U.S. against strikes
on Islamic State

William Branigin and Liz Sly 12:48 PM ET

Damascus warns the U.S. that unilateral strikes against militants, on Syrian soil, would be considered an act of “aggression.” The warning came after the Islamic State overran an air base.

By Liz Sly August 25 at 11:48 AM

BEIRUT — Syria warned the United States on Monday not to extend its air war against radical Islamist militants into Syria, saying that it would regard any attempt to do so as an act of “aggression.”
The warning came a day after fighters with the Islamic State group overran another important Syrian military facility, putting them in full control of the north-central province of Raqqah. American photojournalist James Foley was held for much of his captivity in the province before he was beheaded last week by a masked Islamic State guard with a British accent.
Raqqah is also the site of a failed rescue attempt earlier this summer in which Delta Force commandos sought to snatch Foley and a group of other Americans held by the Islamic State from a prison east of the city of Raqqah, according to U.S. officials and witnesses in the area.
U.S. officials have not ruled out extending the airstrikes launched in Iraq earlier this month into Syria, where the Islamic State has been battling the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
On Monday, Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem signaled that Damascus would not be prepared to tolerate unilateral action against the extremists even in the parts of the country that the government no longer controls.
He told reporters that his government was “ready to cooperate and coordinate on the regional and international level in the war on terror.” But fighting terrorism should be undertaken in cooperation with the Syrian government, “not through transgression against countries’ sovereignty,” he said.
“Any breach of Syrian sovereignty by any side constitutes an act of aggression,” he added.
The capture of the Tabqa air base on Sunday was the latest in a string of recent military successes for the extremist fighters, who have been extending their hold across northern Syria even as U.S. airstrikes temper their expansion in Iraq.
The Islamic State is also pressing east and north into portions of Aleppo that it lost earlier this year to more moderate rebels, threatening to retake key areas along the Turkish border from which it had been ejected.
Tabqa was the most important of three bases in Raqqah that had remained in government hands despite the rebel capture of the province a year ago and its subsequent conquest by the Islamic State. The vast facility about 30 miles southwest Raqqah harbored warplane squadrons, helicopters, tanks, artillery and ammunition bunkers, the Associated Press reported.
In what looked like a de facto truce between the government and the militants, the bases had continued to function even as they were besieged by the rebels. But after the Islamic State’s push into Iraq in June, the Syrian government began to launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions, prompting a counteroffensive by the militants.
Earlier this month, they drove government forces out of the two other bases. They claimed control of Tabqa on Sunday after a bloody, six-day battle in which hundreds were killed on both sides, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The Syrian government said it managed to evacuate most of its troops and aircraft from the base ahead of its fall.
Russia, the most powerful international supporter of Assad, backed the stand articulated by Moualem.
Any “plans to combat Islamic State on the territory of Syria and other countries” must be carried out “in cooperation with legitimate authorities,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said at a news conference in Moscow. He made it clear that Russia feels vindicated in backing Assad’s brutal rule, arguing that the United States made the same mistake with the Islamic State that it did in supporting mujahideen guerrillas in the 1980s in their fight against Soviet forces in Afghanistan.
“At the start, the Americans and some Europeans rather welcomed [the Islamic State] on the basis it was fighting against Bashar al-Assad,” Lavrov said, Reuters news agency reported. “They welcomed it as they welcomed the mujahideen who later created al-Qaeda, and then al-Qaeda struck like a boomerang on September 11, 2001. The same thing is happening now.”
U.S. officials have said Washington has supported moderate, “vetted” Syrian resistance forces in the fight against Assad while shunning radical Islamist elements such as the Islamic State, an al-Qaeda offshoot that has been repudiated even by the terrorist network’s leadership as too extreme.

William Branigin in Washington contributed to this report.

Liz Sly is the Post’s Beirut bureau chief. She has spent more than 15 years covering the Middle East, including the Iraq war. Other postings include Africa, China and Afghanistan.

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