MOSCOW: Russia has fired cruise missiles from the Mediterranean Sea on Daesh positions in Syria, the Defense Ministry said on Friday, Moscow’s latest show of strength in the conflict wracking the Mideast country.
The ministry said in a statement that two frigates and a submarine launched six cruise missiles on Daesh installations in Syria’s Hama province, destroying command centers and ammunition depots. It did not say when the missiles were launched.
Moscow has fired missiles from the Mediterranean at militants’ positions in Syria before, including launches from a submarine and a frigate in May at targets in the area of the ancient city of Palmyra.
It said that the Turkish and Israeli military “were informed in a timely manner of the missile launches through communication channels,” but it did not mention the US.
Russia has suspended its communication channel with the US on military operations in Syria after a US jet shot down a Syrian warplane on Sunday, with Moscow accusing Washington of failing to issue a warning.
The ministry said that Russia’s Admiral Essen and Admiral Grigorovich warships and the Krasnodar submarine fired six Kalibr missiles at command centers and weapons stores in Syria’s Hama region.
“As a result of the surprise mass missile strike, command points were destroyed and also large stores of weapons and ammunition of the Daesh terrorists in the area of Aqirbat in the Hama province,” it said.
The ministry added that Russian planes then carried out aerial strikes that “destroyed the remainder of the Daesh fighters and their facilities.”
The ministry released video footage of missiles being fired from underwater by the submarine and from the ships as well as aerial footage of the missiles striking two-story buildings in what appeared to be semi-desert areas.
The most recent such strikes from ships and submarines were announced by the ministry on May 31, aimed at targets around Palmyra.
Russia is one of the strongest backers of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime and has been carrying out airstrikes in the country since September 2015.
Separately on Friday, a senior Russian lawmaker said Moscow is “nearly 100 percent” sure that the top Daesh leader was killed in a Russian airstrike last month.
The Defense Ministry first made the claim last week, saying that Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi’s death in the May 28 strike on the outskirts of the Syrian city of Raqqa was still “being verified through various channels.”
Viktor Ozerov, head of the defense and security committee at the upper chamber of the Russian Parliament, told the Interfax news agency on Friday that Russia’s intelligence about Al-Baghdadi’s death is “nearly 100 percent” certain.
“Russia would not want to be on the list of the countries that have said before that he was killed and then Al-Baghdadi would resurrect,” Ozerov added.
The whereabouts of the shadowy Al-Baghdadi, with a $25 million US bounty on his head, have not been known. His last public appearance was almost three years ago in the Iraqi city of Mosul, at the 12th-century Al-Nuri Mosque from where he declared a “caliphate” in the territory that Daesh had seized in Iraq and Syria in July 2014.
That mosque, along with its famous leaning minaret, was destroyed on Wednesday night, blown up by Daesh militants as their control of Mosul increasingly is slipping away. The mosque would have been a symbolic prize for Iraqi forces and the US-led coalition in the fight for Iraq’s second-largest city.
The ministry said Friday that Daesh fighters have been moving forces into Hama province this week under cover of night and using large buildings there as command points and weapons stores.
It said the fighters were trying to move out from Raqqa towards Palmyra.
Noose tightens: Russia fires missiles at Daesh from Mediterranean
Noose tightens: Russia fires missiles at Daesh from Mediterranean
Documentary highlights Israeli brutality
- ‘American Doctor’ shows bravery of men voluntarily going to work in hospitals repeatedly hit by Israeli army
- Despite a fragile ceasefire in place since October last year, there has been continued violence between Israeli forces and Hamas, which has seen Palestinian non-combatants killed, including dozens of children
PARK CITY, US: At the start of “American Doctor,” a new documentary about US medics working in hospitals in the Gaza Strip during the Israel-Hamas war, director Poh Si Teng initially declines to film pictures of dead Palestinian children that one of the doctors is trying to show her.
Teng worries that she will have to pixelate the gruesome scene to protect the dignity of the children.
“You’re not dignifying them unless you let their memory, their bodies, tell the story of this trauma, of this genocide. You’re not doing them a service by not showing them,” Jewish-American doctor Mark Perlmutter tells her.
“This is what my tax dollars did. That’s what your tax dollars did. That’s what my neighbor’s tax dollars did. They have the right to know the truth.
“You have the responsibility, as I do, to tell the truth.
You pixelate this, that’s journalistic malpractice.”
Teng’s unflinching film follows Perlmutter and two other American doctors — one Palestinian American and the other a non-practicing
Zoroastrian — as they try to treat the results of the unspeakable brutality visited on a largely civilian population in Gaza since Israel launched its retaliation for Hamas’s October 2023 attack.
Alongside the severed limbs and the open wounds, the doctors labor on with their Palestinian colleagues, we also see the trio’s attempts at advocacy — in Washington’s corridors of power and in Israeli and American media.
The documentary also depicts the practical difficulties they face — the surgical scrubs and antibiotics they have to smuggle across the border to get around the Israeli blockade, and the last-minute refusals of Israeli authorities to let them in.
And we see the bravery of men voluntarily going to work in hospitals that are repeatedly hit by the Israeli army.
Israel rejects accusations its numerous strikes against Gaza hospitals amount to war crimes, saying it is targeting “terrorists” in these facilities and claims Hamas operatives are holed up in tunnels underneath the hospitals.
The attacks include the so-called “double tap” strike on the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, in the south of the Strip, in August 2025 where the three men have worked.
Emergency responders and journalists who had rushed to the scene after a first projectile hit were killed when a second was fired at the same spot.
Feroze Sidwha, perhaps the most eloquent of the three doctors, repeatedly makes the case throughout the film that he has never seen any tunnels and that, in any case, even the presence of wounded fighters in a hospital does not make it a legitimate target.
“Americans deserve the opportunity to know what’s going on, what their money is being used for, and you know, just to decide. ‘Do you really want this being done?’,” he said at the Sundance Film Festival, where the film got its premiere on Friday.
“I’m pretty sure the answer is ‘no’. I just want to keep speaking out and letting people know they don’t have to be an accessory to child murder. But we all are, right now.”
The film is dedicated to the around 1,700 healthcare workers who have been killed since Israel launched its invasion in October 2023.
UN investigators have accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, a charge that Israel has denied as “distorted and false,” while accusing the authors of antisemitism.
Despite a fragile ceasefire in place since October last year, there has been continued violence between Israeli forces and Hamas, which has seen Palestinian non-combatants killed, including dozens of children, according to UNICEF.
Reporters Without Borders says nearly 220 journalists have died since the start of the war, making Israel the biggest killer of journalists worldwide for three years running.
The Sundance Film Festival runs until Feb. 1.
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