MOSCOW: Russia has shocked the West by boosting its military presence in Syria as President Vladimir Putin seeks to not just defeat Islamic State radicals but also to gain a firm foothold in the strategic Middle Eastern country.
Putin has seized the initiative more than four years into a civil war that has killed more than 240,000 people and led to the emergence of IS, amid the collective failure of the international community to stop the violence.
At the end of June, Putin proposed the creation of a broad military coalition that would partly rely on the Syrian army to fight Islamic State.
As Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov sought to sell the idea to his US and Saudi counterparts as well as various Syrian opposition groups, Russia's arms industry stepped up deliveries to the Damascus regime.
Russian warships sailed through Istanbul's Bosphorus Strait towards the Syrian port of Tartus where Russia has a naval facility.
In recent weeks, US satellites have recorded increased activity by Russian forces at an airport in the coastal region of Latakia, the ancestral heartland of President Bashar al-Assad.
Washington and NATO say that recent spottings of helicopters, bomber jets, ground attack aircraft, tanks and soldiers prove that Russia is building an airbase.
AFP
