In this image made from video provided by Homs Media Centre, which has been verified and is consistent with other AP reporting, smoke rises after airstrikes by military jets in Talbiseh of the Homs province, western Syria, Wednesday, Sept. 30, 2015. Russian military jets carried out airstrikes in Syria for the first time on Wednesday, targeting what Moscow said were Islamic State positions. (Homs Media Centre via AP)

Russian military jets carried out airstrikes in Syria for the first time on Wednesday, targeting what Moscow said were Islamic State positions. However a U.S. official and others cast doubt on that claim, saying the Russians appeared to be attacking opposition groups fighting Syrian government forces.

President Vladimir Putin sought to portray the airstrikes as a pre-emptive attack against the Islamic militants who have taken over large parts of Syria and Iraq. Russia estimates at least 2,400 of its own citizens are already fighting alongside extremists in Syria and Iraq.

Video released by the Russian Defense Ministry:



“If they (militants) succeed in Syria, they will return to their home country, and they will come to Russia, too,” Putin said in a televised speech at a government session.

The U.S. and Russia both agree on the need to fight Islamic State, but are in dispute about what to do about Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government. At the U.N. General Assembly, President Barack Obama said the U.S. and Russia could work together on a political transition, but only if Assad leaving power was the result. Putin is Assad’s most powerful backer.

The Russian airstrikes targeted positions, vehicles and warehouses that Moscow believes belong to IS militants, Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov told Russian news agencies.

A senior U.S. official, however, said the airstrikes don’t appear to be targeting ISIL, because the militants aren’t in the western part of the country, beyond Homs, where the strikes were directed.

It appears the strikes were directed against opposition groups fighting against Assad, according to the official, who wasn’t authorized to discuss the Russian airstrikes publicly so spoke on condition of anonymity.

Russia notified the U.S. about the impending airstrikes through the embassy in Baghdad about an hour before they started, the official said. According to the official, there were no conflicts with the Russian strikes, and they had no impact on the coalition missions, which are primarily in the north and east. The U.S. is still trying to assess the damages of the Russian strikes.

Syrian state television quoted an unnamed military official as saying that Russian warplanes have targeted ISIL positions in central Syria, including the areas of Rastan and Talbiseh, and areas near the town of Salamiyeh in Hama province.

ISIL controls parts of Homs province, including the historic town of Palmyra. Homs also has positions run by al-Qaida’s affiliate in Syria, known as the Nusra Front. Both groups have fighters from the former Soviet Union including Chechens.

The official said the Russian airstrikes were in cooperation with the Syrian air force.

Genevieve Casagrande of the Institute of the Study of War, using an alternative acronym for Islamic State, said the airstrike on Talbisah, “did not hit ISIS militants and rather resulted in a large number of civilian casualties.”

“If confirmed, the airstrike would signal Russian intent to assist in the Syrian regime’s war effort at large, rather than securing the regime’s coastal heartland of Latakia and Tartous,” she said.

Meanwhile a U.S.-backed Syrian rebel group claimed that Russian warplanes have hit its positions in central Syria. The group, known as Tajamu Alezzah, wrote scornfully on Twitter Wednesday that “eradicating terrorism appears to begin with attacks” on its locations in the central city of Latamna in the province of Hama.

The group, which boasts of having TOW missiles, didn’t provide specific details on the targets or how it can ascertain the strikes were by Russian jets.

Washington has equipped and trained a number of moderate Syrian rebel groups but most have been crushed by al-Qaida’s affiliate in Syria.

Former U.S. CIA director, Gen. David Petraeus, has said he believes Russian President Vladimir Putin’s immediate objective in Syria is to solidify the corridor on the Mediterranean coast between Latakia where he has an air base and Tartus where he has a Russian naval base.

As he testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee last week, Petraeus said Putin also wants to help Syrian President Bashar Assad solidify his grip on the country, which has been increasingly challenged in recent months by the Islamic State and other opposition groups.

Petraeus warned against partnering with Russia, Iran and Assad against IS and said the U.S. should deter any action by Russia involving any of the forces backed by the U.S.

“If Russia wanted to fight ISIS, they could have joined the 60-plus member coalition that Gen. Allen has so capably put together and help drop bombs on ISIS. They have some capabilities that would be useful to that fight so this is clearly not what they’re up to,” he said.

U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby told The Associated Press that a Russian official in Baghdad informed U.S. Embassy personnel that Russian military aircraft would shortly begin flying anti-ISIL missions over Syria. The Russian official also asked that U.S. aircraft avoid Syrian airspace during those missions Wednesday. Kirby didn’t say whether the U.S. agreed to that request.

The U.S.-led coalition fighting ISIL will continue to fly missions over Iraq and Syria, Kirby added.

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest also said in a conference call to journalists that Russia will have no better results pursing a military solution in Syria than the U.S. did in Iraq.

The U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity said there were no conflicts with the Russian strikes, and they had no impact on the coalition missions, which are primarily in the north and east.

Russian lawmakers voted unanimously Wednesday to allow Putin to order the airstrikes in Syria, where Russia has deployed fighter jets and other weapons in recent weeks. The Federation Council, the upper chamber of the Russian parliament, discussed Putin’s request for the authorization behind closed doors, cutting off its live web broadcast to hold a debate notable for its quickness.

Putin had to request parliamentary approval for any use of Russian troops abroad, according to the constitution. The last time he did so was before Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in March 2014.

Putin insisted that Russia is not going to send ground troops to Syria and that its role in Syrian army operations will be limited.

“We certainly are not going to plunge head-on into this conflict,” he said. “First, we will be supporting the Syrian army purely in its legitimate fight with terrorist groups. Second, this will be air support without any participation in the ground operations.”

Putin also said he expects Assad, Russia’s long-time ally, to sit down and talk with the Syrian opposition about a political settlement, but added he was referring to what he described as a “healthy” opposition group.

Russia’s first airstrike on Syria came after Putin’s meeting Monday with Obama on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly meeting in New York, where the two discussed Russia’s military buildup in Syria.

Putin and other officials have said Russia was providing weapons and training to Assad’s army to help it combat IS. Russian navy transport vessels have been shuttling back and forth for weeks to ferry troops, weapons and supplies to an air base near the Syrian coastal city of Latakia. IHS Jane’s, a leading defense research group, said last week that satellite images of the base showed 28 jets, including Su-30 multirole fighters, Su-25 ground attack jets, Su-24 bombers and possibly Ka-52 helicopter gunships.

Sergei Ivanov, chief of Putin’s administration, said in televised remarks after the parliamentary vote that Moscow was responding to a request from Assad asking for help. He said the biggest difference between Russian airstrikes and those being conducted by the U.S. and other countries is that “they do not comply with international law, but we do.”

Moscow has always been a top ally of Assad. The war in Syria against his regime, which began in 2011, has left at least 250,000 dead and forced millions to flee the country. It is also the driving force behind the record-breaking number of asylum-seekers fleeing to Europe this year.

Worried by the threat of Russian and U.S. jets clashing inadvertently over Syrian skies, Washington agreed to talk to Moscow on how to “deconflict” their military actions. Last week, U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter had a 50-minute phone call with his Russian counterpart — the first such military-to-military discussion between the two countries in more than a year.

On Tuesday, Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook said Carter had instructed his staff to contact Russian officials about establishing talks on ways to keep each other’s air operations in Syria from colliding or otherwise getting in each other’s way. Cook said it wasn’t yet clear when these talks would start.

Israel has taken similar precautions, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visiting Moscow last week to agree with Putin on a coordination mechanism to avoid any possible confrontation between Israeli and Russian forces in Syria.

Russian Federation Council chairwoman Valentina Matvienko said in a live news conference on Russian television that parliament’s decision reflected Russia’s growing role in global affairs.

“We as a great power cannot but take part in fighting this great evil,” Matvienko said, adding that the Soviet Union and Syria signed a security cooperation agreement in 1980 that guarantees that Moscow would help Damascus if asked. “We couldn’t refuse Bashar Assad and keep on seeing how people, women and children are dying.”

In Baghdad, Saad al-Hadithi, a spokesman for the Iraqi prime minister, said his government was in talks with Russia “in the hope that shared intelligence will further our abilities to defeat the terrorists within our borders.”

Story compiled from AP reports