The chief of the Russian General Staff\u00a0 on Wednesday accused the U.S. of training former Islamic State fighters in Syria to try to destabilise the country.
\nGen. Valery Gerasimov\u2019s allegations, made in a newspaper interview, centre on a U.S. military base at Tanf, a strategic Syrian highway border crossing with Iraq in the south of the country.
\nRussia says the U.S. base is illegal and that it and the area around it have become \u201ca black hole\u201d where militants operate unhindered .Islamic State has this year lost almost all the territory it held in Syria and Iraq.
\nRussian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Wednesday the main part of the battle with Islamic State in Syria was over, according to the state-run RIA news agency.
\nThe U.S. says the Tanf facility is a temporary base used to train partner forces to fight Islamic State.
\nIt has rejected similar Russian allegations in the past, saying Washington remains committed to killing off Islamic State and denying it safe havens.
\nGerasimov told the daily Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper that the U.S. was training up fighters who were former Islamic State militants but who now call themselves the New Syrian Army or use other names.
\nHe said Russia satellites and drones had spotted militant brigades at the U.S. base.
\n\u201cThey are in reality being trained there,\u201d Gerasimov said, saying there were also a large number of militants and former Islamic State fighters at Shadadi, where he said there was also a U.S. base.
\n\u201cThey are practically Islamic State,\u201d he said.
\n\u201cBut after they are worked with, they change their spots and take on another name.
\n\u201cTheir task is to destabilize the situation.\u201d
\nRussia has partially withdrawn from Syria, but Gerasimov said the fact that Moscow was keeping an air base and naval facility there meant it was well placed to deal with pockets of instability if and when they arose.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The chief of the Russian General Staff\u00a0 on Wednesday accused the U.S. of training former Islamic State fighters in Syria to try to destabilise the country. Gen. Valery Gerasimov\u2019s allegations, made in a newspaper interview, centre on a U.S. military base at Tanf, a strategic Syrian highway border crossing with Iraq in the south of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":49786,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[258,198,810],"class_list":["post-29345","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-isis","tag-russia","tag-us"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.metronews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29345","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.metronews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.metronews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.metronews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.metronews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29345"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.metronews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29345\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.metronews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.metronews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.metronews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.metronews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}