ISIL downs Syria warplane: monitor

BEIRUT // ISIL militants shot down a Syrian warplane conducting airstrikes on the group’s stronghold of Raqqah, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

“[ISIL] fighters fired on a military aircraft which crashed,” the Britain-based monitoring group said.

“It is the first aircraft shot down since the regime launched air strikes against the jihadists in July following their declaration of a caliphate in late June,” said the Observatory, which relies on a network of doctors and activists for its reports.

The Observatory’s director Rami Abdel Rahman said that the plane was carrying out strikes on the ISIL stronghold of Raqqah when it was hit.

It crashed into a house in the Euphrates Valley city, the sole provincial capital entirely out of Syrian government control, causing deaths and injuries on the ground, he said.

A photograph posted on a militant Twitter account purported to show the burnt-out wreckage of the plane.

“Allahu Akbar [God is greater], thanks to God we can confirm that a military aircraft has been shot down over Raqqah,” another account said, congratulating the “lions of the Islamic State”.

The plane is far from the first Syrian government aircraft downed by opposition forces, but it comes after president Bashar Al Assad’s regime stepped up its air campaign against ISIL in eastern Syria.

In recent weeks it has repeatedly targeted the group’s Euphrates Valley strongholds in Raqqah and Deir El Zour provinces and militant-held areas of the north-eastern province of Hasakah.

An airstrike on an ISIL training camp in the Deir El Zour town of Tibni killed 17 militants and a child on Saturday.

US president Barack Obama announced last week he had authorised the expansion to Syria of the air campaign against ISIL that he launched in neighbouring Iraq in early August.

There have been no US strikes in Syria so far but Mr Obama’s announcement drew protests from Damascus and its Iranian and Russian allies.

* Agence France-Presse