What he didn't say was that the nearest Daesh position to any of the areas Russia attacked on Wednesday and Thursday was 55 kilometres away. This is anything but an anti-Daesh campaign. Daesh was driven out of the province of Idlib in January 2014 by the very same rebel groups that Russia is targeting today. The Assad regime, like the Russian government, would like the world to believe that it is fighting Daesh but in practice it has left the group to itself, allowing it to take over most of eastern Syria.

1. russian airstrike in syria saving
Russia's military intervention in Syria has been sold to the world as action against Daesh but it is
now clear that the real targets are anyone but the militant group. On the first day of the airstrikes,
65 people were killed, the vast majority civilians. The casualties of these airstrikes are added to
the estimated 200-300,000 casualties of the Syrian conflict – 95 per cent of them caused by the
regime of President Bashar Al-Assad, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights.
Activists uploaded videos of a child injured by the airstrikes in Talbiseh and a mosque destroyed
in Jisr Al-Shughour as a result of the strikes, but they have broadcast many such videos in the
past, when Al-Assad's planes dropped missiles, barrel bombs, and chlorine and mustard gas on
civilian towns and villages, and been ignored by the world's media.
The Russian airstrikes struck targets in Idlib, Hama and Homs provinces. The targets included
Talbiseh, Rastan, Latamneh and Kafr Zeita. These towns are not well-known in the west but
Syrians know them as centres of peaceful protest against the regime following the outbreak of the
Syrian uprising in 2011 and later as sites of massacres in which dozens of people died as the
Assad regime took revenge on its own people. Another town attacked by Russia - Kafranbel - has
a symbolic significance as the "pulse of the Syrian revolution". With its innovative protests
featuring English-language banners held every Friday for the past four years, this small town told
an uncaring world what Syrians were thinking.
Russia, it seems, wants to finish the job that Assad started but is unable to complete. After a long
publicity campaign in which Putin's government tried to present itself as saving the world from
Daesh, receiving the backing of the Russian Orthodox Church in the process, Russia admitted
that it was targeting groups with no connection to Daesh. A spokesman for President Putin said:
"These organisations are well known and the targets are chosen in coordination with the armed
forces of Syria."