Putin: Syrian campaign showed off Russia’s military might

A paramedic holds a baby inside an ambulance during an evacuation operation on Wednesday in Eastern Ghouta, Syria. (AFP)

MOSCOW: President Vladimir Putin praised Russian soldiers on Thursday for their actions in Syria, saying the Russian campaign there has demonstrated the might of the nation’s revamped military to the world.
Speaking at a Kremlin awards ceremony for troops who fought in Syria, Putin said Russia has “made the main, decisive contribution to the destruction of a criminal group that cast a challenge to the entire civilization.”
He said that Daesh was seeking to turn Syria into a base for “global aggression” and threaten Russia.
Putin said the more than 48,000 Russian troops who took part in the Syria campaign were fighting for their “homeland, for a just and fair cause.”
“Your heroic actions and professionalism helped preserve the Syrian state, stop mass killings, executions and terror against civilians,” Putin told hundreds of soldiers who gathered in the Kremlin’s opulent, gold-and-white St. George’s Hall.
Also on Thursday, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said 16 patients and their families had been evacuated from besieged suburbs of Damascus.
The ICRC said the latest evacuations from Eastern Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus, were carried out late on Wednesday and into Thursday in coordination with the Syrian Arab Red Crescent. It said more than half of the 16 medical evacuees were children.
The ICRC said on Wednesday the regime had agreed to allow 29 patients and their families to be evacuated from the besieged region — a sliver of the some 500 people listed by the UN as requiring urgent medical care in Damascus. More than a dozen have died waiting for evacuation, according to the UN.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which closely tracks the conflict through activists and other sources inside Syria, said 17 patients have been evacuated since Tuesday. It said militants had released 26 people, including eight minors and four women.
The Observatory said the war killed about 39,000 people in 2017, of which it had documented 33,425 by name.
The group, which monitors casualties on all sides of the complex war, said the dead included 10,507 civilians, 2,923 regime troops and 7,494 extremist fighters, mainly members of Daesh and an Al-Qaeda-linked outfit.