At least 200 civilians and around a dozen fighters in Syria have been killed by Russian air strikes, Amnesty International has said. The human rights watchdog has also accused Russia of using "banned cluster munitions and unguided bombs" in populated residential areas, which cause huge damage to infrastructure.

Amnesty International says it "researched remotely" more than 25 Russian attacks in five areas between 30 September and 29 November with the help of witnesses, activists, video clips and other images to come to its findings. Amnesty said it researched Russian bombings in Homs, Hama, Idlib, Latakia and Aleppo and that Moscow may have committed war crimes.

"Some Russian air strikes appear to have directly attacked civilians or civilian objects by striking residential areas with no evident military target and even medical facilities, resulting in deaths and injuries to civilians. Such attacks may amount to war crimes," said Philip Luther, director of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) programme at Amnesty International.

Russia has denied killing civilians and has maintained that it has only attacked "terrorist" targets in Syria. The report, however, says that the Russian bombs struck areas where there were no military targets or fighters in the immediate vicinity. It added that Russia may have lied to cover up for damages caused to a mosque and hospital from its bombings.

"By presenting satellite imagery of an intact mosque and claiming it showed another that had been destroyed, the Russian authorities appear to have used sleight of hand to try to avoid reproach and avert scrutiny of their actions in Syria. Such conduct does not cultivate confidence in their willingness to investigate reported violations in good faith," Luther said.

"Russia's Ministry of Defence must be more transparent and disclose targets of their attacks in order to facilitate assessment of whether they are complying with their obligations under international humanitarian law," Philip Luther added.

The report says one of the deadliest attacks occurred in centre of Ariha in Idlib when three missiles struck a busy market place killing 49 civilians. "In just a few moments, people were screaming, the smell of burning was in the air and there was just chaos. There was a primary school nearby, and children were running out absolutely terrified... there were bodies everywhere, decapitated and mutilated," Mohammed Qurabi al-Ghazal, a local media activist, said.

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Seven children, four men and two women drowned when a boat carrying migrants capsized off the tiny Greek island of Farmakonisi, coastguard officials said on Wednesday as a refugee exodus toward Europe continued despite winter cold.

Another 15 people - 13 men and two women - were rescued and taken for health checks to the nearby island of Leros, where Greece has set up dozens of prefabricated homes. One person was still missing according to witnesses, the officials said.

"The vessel, a 6-metre (20-foot) speedboat, sank under unknown circumstances," one of the officials told Reuters.

The coastguard has rescued roughly 100,000 people trying to reach Greek islands from mainly Turkish shores this year.

The island of Farmakonisi has a population of about 10 people and is close to Turkey's coast. A helicopter, two patrol boats and private vessels assisted the rescue operation in the early morning hours.

Fleeing war, thousands of mainly Syrian refugees have braved rough seas this year to make the short but precarious journey from Turkey to Greece's islands, from which most continue to mainland Greece and northward into wealthier western Europe. Winter conditions make the journey even more dangerous.

"As we enter the winter season, it will only become more difficult," said another Greek official. "We are out there, night and day, but some tragedies cannot be averted."

More than 1 million refugees and migrants came to the European Union in 2015, while almost 3,700 died or went missing during the journey, which has reaped huge profit for smugglers, the International Organization for Migration said on Tuesday.

The biggest migration crisis in Europe since World War Two has caused strains and recriminations between EU governments.

The EU is counting on Ankara to stem the flow of refugees from Turkey into Greece and onward to Germany and other EU countries. But an EU report said there was little evidence of progress since Turkey signed an "action plan" with the EU.

Its neighbor, Greece, which is a gateway to the EU, is also trying to rebuff criticism that it has done too little to manage the people arriving on its shores.

During an EU summit on migration last week, Athens promised to speed up the construction of EU-assisted reception and registration centers, so-called hotspots, on five islands. So far, only one in Lesbos is operational.

Seven children, four men and two women drowned when a boat carrying migrants capsized off the tiny Greek island of Farmakonisi, coastguard officials said on Wednesday as a refugee exodus toward Europe continued despite winter cold.

Another 15 people - 13 men and two women - were rescued and taken for health checks to the nearby island of Leros, where Greece has set up dozens of prefabricated homes. One person was still missing according to witnesses, the officials said.

"The vessel, a 6-metre (20-foot) speedboat, sank under unknown circumstances," one of the officials told Reuters.

The coastguard has rescued roughly 100,000 people trying to reach Greek islands from mainly Turkish shores this year.

The island of Farmakonisi has a population of about 10 people and is close to Turkey's coast. A helicopter, two patrol boats and private vessels assisted the rescue operation in the early morning hours.

Fleeing war, thousands of mainly Syrian refugees have braved rough seas this year to make the short but precarious journey from Turkey to Greece's islands, from which most continue to mainland Greece and northward into wealthier western Europe. Winter conditions make the journey even more dangerous.

"As we enter the winter season, it will only become more difficult," said another Greek official. "We are out there, night and day, but some tragedies cannot be averted."

More than 1 million refugees and migrants came to the European Union in 2015, while almost 3,700 died or went missing during the journey, which has reaped huge profit for smugglers, the International Organization for Migration said on Tuesday.

The biggest migration crisis in Europe since World War Two has caused strains and recriminations between EU governments.

The EU is counting on Ankara to stem the flow of refugees from Turkey into Greece and onward to Germany and other EU countries. But an EU report said there was little evidence of progress since Turkey signed an "action plan" with the EU.

Its neighbor, Greece, which is a gateway to the EU, is also trying to rebuff criticism that it has done too little to manage the people arriving on its shores.

During an EU summit on migration last week, Athens promised to speed up the construction of EU-assisted reception and registration centers, so-called hotspots, on five islands. So far, only one in Lesbos is operational.

SEE ALSO: Russian airstrikes in Syria have killed 'at least 200 civilians'

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A close adviser to Syrian President Bashar al Assad said on Wednesday Damascus was ready to join U.N.-sponsored peace talks with its position bolstered by both Russian backing and the West's retreat from a hardline anti-Assad approach.

Bouthaina Shaaban said her government approved of U.N. resolutions passed last week endorsing an international road map for a Syria peace process, a rare display of unity among global powers on a conflict that has killed more than 250,000 people.

"We accept these resolutions," she told Beirut-based al Mayadeen television in the first official Syrian remarks on the matter.

The resolutions gave U.N. blessing to a plan negotiated earlier in Vienna that calls for a ceasefire, talks between the Syrian government and opposition, and a roughly two-year timeline to create a unity government and hold elections.

Shaaban said Damascus perceived a softening of the West's stance on Assad driven by a spillover of Islamic State militant attacks into its own communities - most recently in Paris on Nov. 13 when shootings and suicide bombings killed 130 people.

Islamic State is the strongest insurgent force in Syria and Assad has said that ousting him would clear the way for Islamist militants to take over the country and endanger the wider world.

Western powers have demanded that Assad quit power as part of any peace settlement. Damascus has rejected such calls.

"It was not easy for the West to retreat. This is the first time that the West's word has been defeated over Syria ... The Russian strategy in getting these (diplomatic) understandings is successful and clever and will bear fruit," Shaaban said.

"The Russian intervention has had great importance in the Syrian crisis," she told al-Mayadeen television.

Russia and Iran have been Assad's main allies in the almost five-year-old conflict, while Saudi Arabia, other Gulf Arab states and Western powers have supported insurgents fighting to overthrow him.

Three months of Russian air strikes twinned with army ground offensives backed by Iranian forces and Lebanese Hezbollah fighters have shored up Assad in his western Syrian heartland.

"We are now in a much better position that we were in... There is real international partnership to combat terror, a big understanding of (our) position and the turnaround that started a year ago is now coming to a full circle," Shaaban said.

She dismissed a Saudi-backed opposition body formed from some of the major fighting groups and a wide spectrum of political organizations that will lead its negotiating team at the U.N.-backed talks.

Shaaban said it was "shameful" that the West backed a Saudi- based body that supposedly "wants to create democracy in Syria" with the help of "a country that has no parliament or elections".

A senior U.N. official said on Tuesday the United Nations envoy on Syria, Staffan de Mistura, planned to convene peace talks in Geneva in about a month's time.

(Reporting by Suleiman Al-Khalidi; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

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After days of mounting expectation, the Iraqi government finally announced a serious offensive to retake the city of Ramadi, the capital of western Iraq’s Anbar Province, from Islamic State (IS).

This is far from the first announcement of the imminent recapture of Ramadi, occupied by IS since May 2015 after months of attacks. However, the Iraqi military and allied militias have been foiled before by IS’s tactics of improvised explosive devices, bomb-laden trucks, and booby traps, as well as the destruction of all major bridges into the city.

This has only raised the stakes for the reclaiming of Ramadi. Strategically, it is the “vein of Baghdad”, which is just over 100km to the east, and is close to the holy city of Karbala to the south and to the borders of Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Jordan. IS could use this position both to claim its ascendancy in Iraq – Ramadi is the capital of Anbar, the country’s largest province – and to maintain a route to Raqqa, its central position in Syria.

The loss of Ramadi further challenged the Iraqi Government’s already shaky authority. Thousands of Iraqi families were displaced, and many of them are still trapped on Bzeibiz Bridge. Amid fears that IS-linked men are among the homeless, officials have restricted access to the capital.

So the Iraqi joint military operations command declared its plans to retake the city – but only now has it begun to act on them.

Going in

The plan was that artillery bombardment by the Iraqi army and airstrikes by US-led forces would support a ground assault including Shia paramilitary units, some of them led by Iranian officers, and Sunni tribal fighters. In preparation, Anbar Province’s military command headquarters and the western Ramadi district of Tamim were retaken and occupied.

The final campaign was held up for weeks, ostensibly to give civilians the opportunity to evacuate the city. Then, on December 20, leaflets declared the final chance to leave in the next 72 hours, suggesting two routes for exit. Eyewitnesses and local sources said that IS was preventing departure in hopes of using residents as human shields.

The next day, after military engineers installed a floating bridge over the Warar River, Iraqi forces, including anti-terrorism units, advanced to the centre of Ramadi. Backed by the US-led airstrikes, the anti-terrorism forces announced the capture of the al-Bakr neighborhood to the south of the city, with fierce fighting in nearby areas such as al-Thubat and al-Aramil.

According to local sources, the governmental compound and several neighbourhoods are still under IS’s control. However, Iraqi military officers asserted that the entire city will be pacified by December 25.

The recapture of Ramadi would be another major setback for IS, which – despite its ability to project its threat in Iraq and beyond, as was made clear by last month’s Paris attacks – is a weakening force.

The militants have lost cities and towns such as Tikrit and Sinjar since the summer, and Ramadi’s fall could open the way for an assault on nearby Fallujah, a key strategic position which is also held by the group. IS could have to fall back on its main position in Mosul, Iraq’s third city. IS is also on the defensive in neighbouring Syria, having lost territory to Kurdish forces in the north and east and is finding it difficult to take territory from rebels.

With Baghdad and other cities in the south well-protected from a counter-offensive by IS, a successful campaign could help restore confidence in the Iraqi army, which was humiliated by the loss of territory to IS in Anbar at the start of 2014, its collapse in areas such as Mosul and Tikrit in June of that year, and the setback in Ramadi in May 2015. The return of thousands of displaced people to their homes will be hailed by Baghdad as a further sign of recovery.

But even if a military victory is secured, other challenges await – and they will take a lot of time and effort to overcome.

The challenges of success

Politically, as well as militarily, the Iraqi government needs to work with local federal police and tribes to hold the ground and impose security following the liberation. Iraqi officials have declared that this is all part of a comprehensive post-liberation plan, but this will also need to unite all efforts to rebuild the Iraqi army and enhance its role as the only legitimate, independent national institution. This is crucial not only for Ramadi and surrounding territories, but for the rest of Iraq.

The political challenge is closely entwined with social challenges. Since early 2014, IS has attempted to gain the support of local tribes. This outreach expanded as the group worked to quadruple its force from 4,600 to 16,000 between June 2014 and April 2015. And when the militants captured Ramadi in May 2015, they used the loudspeakers of mosques to urge people to drop their weapons and co-operate with them, and they soon pursued the recruitment of teenagers from the city.

At an economic level, the crisis Iraq is enduring will continue to dog future efforts to reconstruct infrastructure and the areas IS has devastated. This reconstruction is essential to reinforce security, to counter IS’s claim to be a better governing authority, and assuage any fears that the recapture of Ramadi is simply a power grab by a particular political or religious faction or outside power.

Worse still, Baghdad will have to organise these efforts in the face of falling oil prices, the disaster of over 3m internally displaced Iraqis, and a debate over prime minister Haider al-Abadi’s proposals to reduce government size and tackle corruption.

The recapture of Ramadi could give a short-term boost to a government exhausted from two years of defeat on the battlefield and accusations of mismanagement and failure to represent all Iraqis. But it will only have a lasting benefit – both for the people of Anbar and for the battle against IS across the country – if Iraq’s government can finally start to surmount the country’s sectarian divisions and begin manage to run the country properly.

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. officials held secret communications with members of President Bashar al-Assad's government to try to limit violence in Syria, and explored ways to encourage a military coup in 2011 as the civil war got under way, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.

American intelligence officials identified army officers belonging to Assad's minority Alawite sect who could lead a coup, but they found few weak spots to exploit, the Journal said, citing interviews with more than two dozen people, including current and former U.S. officials.

The moves were made as Assad's government began cracking down on protests and soldiers started leaving the army, the Journal said,

"The White House's policy in 2011 was to get to the point of a transition in Syria by finding cracks in the regime and offering incentives for people to abandon Assad," a former senior administration official was quoted as saying.

The Obama administration shifted away from trying to influence Assad's government and toward supporting Syrian rebels in 2012, the newspaper reported.

Senior officials from the United States and Syria spoke directly to each other or sent messages through third parties, including Syrian allies Russia and Iran, the newspaper said.

Deputy Secretary of State William Burns made two phone calls to Syrian foreign minister Walid al-Moallem to warn the Assad regime against using chemical weapons on a large scale, U.S. officials told the newspaper. Burns retired last year.

One senior U.S. official said the secret communications were unlike those held with Cuba or Iran, in which the United States thought it could quietly resolve issues, but were more focused on specifics.

"We have had times where we've said: 'You could create a better environment for cease-fires if you stop dropping barrel bombs,'" a senior U.S. official told the Journal.

(Writing by Doina Chiacu; Editing by Alistair Bell)

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Whether experiencing a terrorist attack in Paris or fleeing war or political violence in Syria and Myanmar, 2015 was a tragic year for millions of people around the world.

Photojournalists work ceaselessly to capture these events and their effects on individuals, and photographers for Reuters were always on the scene, taking some of the year's most newsworthy and captivating photos.

But most of the time, we don't get the full story behind the photo; how it came to be and what the photographer had to do to capture that moment. 

Here, a number of Reuters photographers reveal the stories behind some of 2015's most important pictures.

A note of warning: some of these photos feature scenes of injury or death.

Quotes edited for clarity.

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A migrant carrying a child falls after being tripped by TV camerawoman Petra Laszlo while trying to escape from a collection point in Roszke village, Hungary, September 8th, 2015.

"The camerawoman tripped the migrants on purpose. It came as quite a shock when I realized that. Police collected the migrants from the border with Serbia and then the migrants would wait for buses to take them to registration camps. The nearby camp had been full for days so buses didn’t arrive. After waiting more than 24 hours, migrants started demanding to leave. There were no more than 50 Hungarian police officers compared with about 1,000 migrants. A small group from Syria told me that in 15 minutes the migrants planned to run away and they needed journalists around, afraid the police would start beating them. Reuters colleagues and I watched and waited. After 15 minutes, on the command 'Yalla shabab!' ('Let’s go!') from someone the migrants ran in all directions. Caught by surprise, the police couldn’t stop them. I grabbed my 24-70mm lens, put it on wide open and ran. I saw a man carrying a child running away from a policeman. After about 15 meters the policeman grabbed him by his jacket; the man started shouting and the kid was crying. After a couple of seconds the young policeman let him go. The man started running again. Suddenly, not more than 5 metres away, he fell over the child he was carrying. Thankfully they were unhurt.

When I edited my pictures, I saw a camerawoman in the frame when he fell. I remember sitting with my phone in a hotel in Szeged soon afterwards watching a low-quality news video of the same thing from a different angle. I realized I had the whole tripping sequence on my laptop. It became a huge story that lasted for days, with pictures published everywhere. Reuters was the only one that had still images of that moment." - Marko Djurica

Migrants collect rainwater at a temporary refugee camp near Kanyin Chaung jetty, in Myanmar, on June 4th, 2015.

"This group of Rohingya and Bangladeshi migrants were rescued from a boat carrying 734 people off Myanmar's southern coast. Those on board had been at sea for more than two months — at the end with little food or water. The men in this photo were part of a group of 400 crammed into a warehouse by Myanmar police. They had arrived the day before, but while the women, children, and some men had already been moved, these men were left behind. There was no sign of the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR or foreign aid agencies. Just moments before this shot, the sky opened and the monsoon rains started coming down. The men were jostling with each other for space to catch water in their bottles and plates. The authorities were hesitant to grant us access at first, but as the morning wore on and the rains started, we were able to enter and start photographing and speaking to migrants. Just after taking this photo, the men were loaded into buses and trucks and driven to a camp where international aid agencies were waiting. I have worked on long and difficult assignments where I have gone days without a proper shower. But for these people it had been months without enough water. Everyone was dirty and had likely washed little while at sea. I could see just how meaningful it was for them to suddenly have a chance to drink and clean themselves with whatever small amount of water they could capture." - Soe Zeya Tun

Syrian migrants cross under a fence into Hungary at the border with Serbia, near Roszke, August 27th, 2015.

"Rail tracks, unguarded, line the border with Serbia. Most refugees used the tracks, a few miles long, as a highway into Hungary. I arrived at the border every day at 6am. The crossing was the only spot still not blocked. A triple coil of razor wire was up everywhere else as Hungary prepared to fence off the border. The rail crossing was easy enough but many migrants chose to jump the fence to avoid the police waiting a few hundred meters inside. The razors were not too sharp to handle with heavy gloves. Dozens of other photographers and I paced the fence, some way from the rail tracks. Among the shrubs we could make out the contours of migrants waiting for the right moment. Everyone watched everyone else. We watched the refugees, who watched the police, who watched us. It was like an elaborate board game. It was more than just waiting. The people on the other side of the fence filled the atmosphere with strange, unspeakable tension. This family decided they had waited enough. They started for the fence. Aware of the stakes, they lifted the razor wire, looked around, then went for it. Once across they vanished in the woods. I never saw them again. Photographing the migrants was the ultimate test of staying out of the story: observe keenly, wait, shoot. Don't cut the wire, don’t invite the refugees in, don't alert the police. There was little human contact with the thousands of refugees scaling the fence. You learnt nothing about them. They came and went. But those who walked along the tracks stopped and talked. They accepted water or the odd chocolate bar. They even shared stories — stories that will haunt me forever. There is no way to shake the emotional impact. Once I put the camera down and had time to reflect it all came back. You have to let the story wash through you to remain human." - Bernadette Szabo

Brandon Stanton is at it again.

Stanton is the man behind "Humans Of New York," a popular photo project that puts Stanton and his camera on the streets of New York City and beyond.

Earlier this year, Stanton took a photo of Vidal Chastanet, a 13-year-old from Brownsville, Brooklyn, which has the highest crime rate in New York City. The photo went viral, and it helped Stanton raise more than $1.4 million for Vidal's school, Mott Hall Bridges Academy.

Now Stanton has turned his camera to Syrian refugees. He recently profiled 11 Syrian families moving to America, and he opened a new fund-raising page on Thursday to raise funds for those families.

At 1:40 p.m. on Christmas Eve, around two hours in, the page had raised close to $250,000.

Here is the blurb from the page:

Earlier this month we profiled eleven Syrian families that were preparing to begin new lives in America. They have escaped a horrible war, and have finally secured a degree of safety and security, but the road will be very tough for them. They will be starting at zero in a new country. In addition to the culture shock, they will face innumerable obstacles, including the need to learn an entirely new language. As they attempt to get their footing, they will be provided with little more than the bare minimum needed to subsist.

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BEIRUT (Reuters) - The head of the most powerful Syrian insurgent group in the rebel-held suburbs of Damascus was killed on Friday in a Russian air strike on the secret headquarters of his group, rebel sources said.

The Syrian army confirmed the death of Zahran Alloush, whose Jaysh al Islam grouping has thousands of fighters and is the biggest rebel faction in the area.

Several rebel group leaders have been killed since Russia launched its air campaign on Sept. 30 in support of President Bashar al-Assad, whose troops had suffered a series of setbacks in a civil war now nearing the end of its fifth year. No immediate comment was available from the Russian defense or foreign ministries.

Alloush's removal dealt a major blow to rebel control of the eastern rural suburbs of Damascus, known as al-Ghouta.

It came as around 2,000 Islamist fighters, including members of Islamic State and al Qaeda's Nusra Front, prepared to be evacuated by bus from a rebel-held part of southern Damascus that has been besieged by government forces for years.

They are due to leave under a United Nations-brokered deal that marks another success for the Assad government, increasing its chances of reasserting control over a strategic area just 4 km (2.5 miles) south of the center of the capital.

Separately, the Syrian army said on Friday it had fought its way close to the strategic, rebel-held Aleppo-Damascus highway - its latest gain in a major offensive supported by Iranian-backed Shi'ite militias and Russian air power.

Assad strengthened

The combined developments all strengthen Assad's position as his government prepares for peace talks that the United Nations is planning to convene in Geneva late next month.

The U.N. Security Council on Dec. 18 unanimously approved a resolution endorsing an international road map for a Syrian peace process, a rare show of consensus among major powers on a conflict that has claimed over a quarter of a million lives.

Alloush's Jaysh al Islam, with thousands of trained fighters, is the biggest rebel group, and seen as the most organized. It has been effectively running the administration of Eastern Ghouta.

Alloush was ideologically at odds with Islamic State and al Qaeda, espousing a more moderate brand of Islam and fighting to drive the ultra-militant Islamists out of his territory. But he was criticized for a crackdown on dissidents and accused of kidnapping several prominent activists in 2013.

Syria has long accused Saudi Arabia of paying for arms and other supplies to Alloush. But he is reported to have failed, in visits to countries hostile to Assad, to get the support he wanted for his group.

Defense experts say disarray in rebel forces could consolidate Assad's control over the rest of al-Ghouta, which has been besieged by his forces for several years and has been the target of intensive raids on civilian-populated areas.

Local deals

In a separate development, a British-based monitoring group said the last of some 200 al Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front fighters operating in Deraa province in the south had been given safe passage by the Syrian authorities to leave for rebel-controlled Idlib province.

Damascus agreed to the move in return for the release of Iranian officers captured by Nusra while fighting alongside the Syrian army, said Rami Abdulrahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The evacuations of rebels from south Damascus and Deraa follow previous local deals on truces and safe passage, brokered with the support of outside powers or the United Nations, which has described them as possible stepping stones toward a wider ceasefire.

Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem said on Thursday that Damascus was ready to take part in the forthcoming Geneva peace talks and hoped that the dialogue would help it form a national unity government.

(Writing by Mark Trevelyan; editing by Andrew Roche)

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A top Syrian rebel leader and head of the most powerful insurgent group in the eastern suburbs of Damascus was killed in an aerial raid that targeted the group's headquarters, rebel sources and the Syrian army said on Friday.

The death of Zahran Alloush, 44, head of Jaysh al Islam, is a big blow to rebel control of the rural eastern suburban area of Damascus known as al Ghouta, the rebels said.

Defense experts say the disarray among the rebel forces could also consolidate Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's control over the rest of the area.

Several rebel leaders have been killed since Russia began an aerial campaign on Sept. 30 in support of its ally Assad, although Moscow has insisted that it is concentrating its attacks on Islamic State.

The rebel sources said that in the raid Russian planes fired at least 10 missiles at a secret headquarters of the group, which is the largest rebel faction in the area and has about 15,000 to 20,000 fighters, according to Western intelligence.

The Syrian army said Alloush was killed as the result of intelligence on the ground. Rebels blamed Russian sophisticated spying planes which they say rarely leave their skies.

A rebel source said the group had chosen one of their top military commanders, Abu Hammam al Buwaidani, as their new head.

"Alloush's martyrdom should be a turning point in the history of the revolution and rebel groups should realize they are facing an war of extermination and uprooting by (Russian President Vladimir) Putin's regime," said Labib al Nahhas, a senior figure in the main Ahrar al-Sham rebel group.

Jaysh al Islam has effectively been running the administration of the Eastern Ghouta area since 2013, when the group was formed from an amalgamation of scores of rebel brigades.

The rebels said Alloush was killed while holding a meeting with other rebel leaders in the Marj area of al-Ghouta, which has been the target of a major Syrian assault in the last few weeks.

Jaysh al Islam was one of the main rebel groups that attended a recent Saudi-backed opposition meeting in Riyadh and will be part of a negotiating team that is expected to hold talks with Assad's government in Geneva.

Before setting up Jaysh al Islam, Alloush had founded Liwa al-Islam, or the Brigade of Islam, with his father Abdallah, a Salafist Syrian cleric based in Saudi Arabia. He had a postgraduate degree in religious studies from a Saudi university.

Alloush, who was released by the Syrian authorities at the start of the conflict in 2011 when it let scores of Islamist detainees go free, had been criticized for a crackdown on dissidents in the areas he controlled.

Activists accused him of kidnapping several prominent figures.

Alloush was ideologically at odds with Islamic State and al Qaeda, espousing a more moderate brand of Islam. He fought against more militant Islamists and drove them out of his territory. He had dozens of jihadists locked up behind bars.

Syria has long accused Saudi Arabia of financing arms and other supplies to Alloush. But there have also been reports that while on regional visits to countries hostile to Assad's government including Turkey and Saudi Arabia, Alloush failed to win the support he wanted for his group.

Al-Ghouta has been under siege for years and has been the target of some of the most intensive raids on civilians living in the once heavily populated area.

A chemical gas attack in Ghouta in August 2013 that the United States said killed 1,400 people and which the West blamed on forces loyal to Assad prompted the threat of Western military intervention in the country.

Much of the capital remains firmly in President Assad's control.

(Reporting by Suleiman Al-Khalidi; Editing by Hugh Lawson)

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BEIRUT (AP) — The assassination of a top Syrian rebel commander who led one of the most powerful groups battling President Bashar Assad's forces has dealt a significant setback to the opposition that could reshuffle the lineup of key players on the ground ahead of the planned peace talks in Geneva next month.

On Saturday, the Army of Islam and allied militant groups in Syria mourned the killing of Zahran Alloush, while government supporters and the Islamic State group cheered his death — a reflection of his role in fighting both sides in the Syrian civil war.

Allouch was killed in airstrikes that targeted the group's headquarters during a meeting on Friday. He was instantly killed along with a number of senior commanders of his Army of Islam group and those of the ultraconservative Ahrar al-Sham and the Faylaq al-Rahman groups.

The Syrian army claimed responsibility for the airstrike that killed Allouch, although many among the opposition blamed Russia, which has been bombing IS targets and other insurgent groups since late September.

Allouch was a controversial figure in the war and an authoritative rebel leader who commanded thousands of fighters on the doorstep of Damascus, the seat of Assad's power. His death may have contributed — at least partially — to a delay in an agreed-on pullout of thousands of militants and their families from neighborhoods on the southern edge of Damascus.

The pullout, supposed to start on Saturday, was to involve mainly militants from the Islamic State group who earlier this year overran the Yarmouk area, which is home to a Palestinian refugee camp and has been hotly contested and fought-over in the war, and two adjacent neighborhoods.

A Palestinian official in Damascus, Anwar Abdulhadi, told The Associated Press that the withdrawal is being delayed for "logistical reasons." But Lebanon's Hezbollah-run TV station Al Manar said that Allouch was a key figure in arranging the rare deal, and that his assassination has delayed its implementation. The report could not be immediately confirmed by the AP.

Allouch's killing — a month before peace talks are scheduled to begin between the Syrian government and opposition rebel groups — is a blow to insurgents fighting to topple Assad and a boost to government forces who have been bolstered by the Russian military intervention in Syria.

The Army of Islam took part earlier this month in an opposition meeting held in Saudi Arabia during which it agreed to take part in political talks seeking to end the five-year-old conflict scheduled for late January in Geneva. The Syrian government describes the group as "terrorists" and has said it will not negotiate with such factions.

The U.N. envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, said Saturday that he has set a Jan. 25 target date for the talks in Geneva and said developments on the ground "should not be allowed to derail it."

Anas al-Abdeh, a senior member of the main Western- backed opposition group, the Syrian National Coalition, said the assassination "makes a mockery of all talk of a political settlement" and undermines the "negotiations before they begin."

Several opposition groups also mourned Allouch's death and accused the government and its allies of trying to eliminate rival groups ahead of the talks. Several rebel leaders have been killed since Russia's aerial campaign started on Sept. 30 in support of ally Assad, although Moscow has insisted that it is concentrating its attacks on Islamic State.

"Rebel groups should realize they are facing a war of extermination by (Russian President Vladimir) Putin's regime," said Labib Nahhas, a senior member of the militant rebel Ahrar al-Sham group.

Abu Hassan al-Muhajer, another senior member of Ahrar al-Sham, wrote on Twitter that the "next stage will witness the liquidation of those leaders who began the uprising" against Assad. Other insurgents, including the al-Qaida branch in Syria, the Nusra Front, also lamented the killing.

The Army of Islam swiftly appointed Essam al-Buwaydhani, a field commander known as Abu Hammam, as Allouch's successor. In a video posted on the Internet late Friday, the group said Allouch's killing "will only increase our fight" against Assad's government and the Islamic State.

However, Aron Lund, a Syria expert, said the death of Allouch, who led the Army of Islam since it was founded around four years ago, could amount to "a decapitation strike" for the group.

"Add to that the fact that the Islam Army's dominance has created so much resentment among other factions over the years, and the situation seems very unstable," Lund wrote in an analysis for the popular Syria Comment blog.

A former Islamist prisoner who was released in a general amnesty after the uprising against Assad began in March 2011, Allouch, who is in his mid-40s, joined the armed opposition and formed the Army of Islam — which soon became one of the most organized rebel factions in Syria, based in the Damascus suburb known as Eastern Ghouta.

He reflected the difficulties in identifying moderate rebels from extremists and other militants in Syria. He was widely known to be supported by Saudi Arabia and Turkey but also fought pitched battles against rival Islamic State group near Damascus, with many crediting his group for keeping IS from making further advances toward the Syrian capital.

But critics accused him of sectarian politics and brutal tactics similar to that of the Islamic State group.

He is blamed by other opposition groups for the December 2013 disappearance of four prominent activists, including human rights activist and lawyer Razan Zaytouni. He has denied holding them, although they were abducted from an area under the control of the Army of Islam.

Government supporters also celebrated his death, blaming his group for regularly shelling residential areas in Damascus.

Earlier this year, after government airstrikes on the suburbs of Damascus killed dozens, Allouch's fighters forced some Alawites whom his group was holding into cages that were then displayed in public areas and markets, using them as human shields to try to prevent further airstrikes. Alawites are a Shiite offshoot to which Assad's family also belongs.

The large metal cages with men and women inside were then put on pick-up trucks that drove around Damascus suburbs.

Though delayed, the agreed-on evacuation of insurgents and their families from several neighborhoods of southern Damascus could further bolster Assad's hold over the capital — if it goes through.

The pullout, which was supposed to start on Saturday, was to involve mainly Islamic State militants who were holed up near the capital.

Alloush's death leaves so much up in the air, Lund wrote, especially in the Damascus suburbs of Ghouta.

"If it leads to instability and infighting among the rebels, or weakens command and control in the Ghouta, we could start to see a shift in the balance of power in the Syrian capital over the coming months," he said.

___

Associated Press writers Albert Aji in Damascus, Syria, and Maamoun Youssef in Cairo contributed to this report.

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Three months into his military intervention in Syria, Russian President Vladimir Putin has achieved his central goal of stabilizing the Assad government and, with the costs relatively low, could sustain military operations at this level for years, U.S. officials and military analysts say.

That assessment comes despite public assertions by President Barack Obama and top aides that Putin has embarked on an ill-conceived mission in support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad that it will struggle to afford and that will likely fail.

"I think it's indisputable that the Assad regime, with Russian military support, is probably in a safer position than it was," said a senior administration official, who requested anonymity. Five other U.S. officials interviewed by Reuters concurred with the view that the Russian mission has been mostly successful so far and is facing relatively low costs.

The U.S. officials stressed that Putin could face serious problems the longer his involvement in the more than four-year-old civil war drags on.

Yet since its campaign began on Sept. 30, Russia has suffered minimal casualties and, despite domestic fiscal woes, is handily covering the operation's cost, which analysts estimate at $1-2 billion a year. The war is being funded from Russia's regular annual defense budget of about $54 billion, a U.S. intelligence official said.

The expense, analysts and officials said, is being kept in check by plummeting oil prices that, while hurting Russia's overall economy, has helped its defense budget stretch further by reducing the costs of fueling aircraft and ships. It has also been able to tap a stockpile of conventional bombs dating to the Soviet era.

Putin has said his intervention is aimed at stabilizing the Assad government and helping it fight the Islamic State group, though Western officials and Syrian opposition groups say its air strikes mostly have targeted moderate rebels.

Russia's Syrian and Iranian partners have made few major territorial gains.

Yet Putin’s intervention has halted the opposition's momentum, allowing pro-Assad forces to take the offensive. Prior to Russia's military action, U.S. and Western officials said, Assad's government looked increasingly threatened.

Rather than pushing back the opposition, Russia may be settling for defending Assad's grip on key population centers that include the heartland of his minority Alawite sect, said the U.S. intelligence official.

Russia is taking advantage of the operation to test new weapons in battlefield conditions and integrate them into its tactics, the intelligence official said. It is refining its use of unarmed surveillance drones, the official added.

"The Russians didn't go blindly into this," said the U.S. intelligence official, adding that they "are getting some benefit out of the cost."

QUAGMIRE?

Russia's intervention also appears to have strengthened its hand at the negotiating table. In recent weeks, Washington has engaged more closely with Russia in seeking a settlement to the war and backed off a demand for the immediate departure of Assad as part of any political transition.

Obama has suggested as recently as this month that Moscow is being sucked into a foreign venture that will drain its resources and bog down its military.

"An attempt by Russia and Iran to prop up Assad and try to pacify the population is just going to get them stuck in a quagmire and it won't work," Obama said on Oct. 2.

On Dec. 1, he raised the prospect of Russia becoming "bogged down in an inconclusive and paralyzing civil conflict."

The senior administration official denied any contradiction between Obama's statements and private assessments that Russia's campaign has been relatively effective so far.

"I think the president's point has been...it's not going to succeed in the long run," the official said. The Russians "have become bound up in a civil war in a way that's going to be extremely difficult to extricate themselves from."

U.S. officials have not publicly defined what a quagmire would look like for Russia. But Obama has raised the Soviet Union's disastrous decade-long Afghanistan occupation from 1979.

U.S. officials said Russia's military footprint is relatively light. It comprises a long-time naval facility in Tartus, a major air base near the port city of Latakia, a second under expansion near Homs and several lesser posts.

There are an estimated 5,000 Russian personnel in Syria, including pilots, ground crews, intelligence personnel, security units protecting the Russian bases and advisers to the Syrian government forces.

Russia has lost an airliner to an Islamic State-claimed attack over Egypt that killed 224 people, and an Su-24 supersonic bomber shot down by Turkey. It is also allied with an exhausted Syrian army that is suffering manpower shortages and facing U.S.-backed rebels using anti-tank missiles.

"It’s been a grind," said the intelligence official, adding that in terms of ground gains, "I think the Russians are not where they expected to be."

Russian casualties in Syria have been relatively minimal, officially put at three dead. U.S. officials estimate that Russia may have suffered as many as 30 casualties overall.

Vasily Kashin, a Moscow-based analyst, said the war is not financially stressing Russia.

"All the available data shows us that the current level of military effort is completely insignificant for the Russian economy and Russian budget," said Kashin, of the Center for Analyses of Strategies and Technologies.

"It can be carried on at the same level year after year after year," he said.

(Additional reporting by Jason Bush in Moscow and Phil Stewart in Washington. Editing by Stuart Grudgings.)

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Sacha Baron Cohen and his wife Isla Fisher are donating $1 million to help Syrian refugees. The donation will be split between Save the Children and the International Rescue Committee. 

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Republican presidential hopeful Ben Carson still isn't fully backing away from what many considered a blunder in a series of fall foreign-policy missteps, suggesting that "people in the CIA" told him that there is Chinese military involvement in the conflict in Syria.

Carson addressed his comments about China and Syria in a wide-ranging interview with The Washington Post.

During a November debate, the retired neurosurgeon said that having US special operations forces in Syria is better than not having them there, and then noted that Syria is a "very complex place."

"You know, the Chinese are there, as well as the Russians, and you have all kinds of factions there," he said.

In response to a question from The Post about whether his policies have affected his standing in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, Carson said, "In terms of missteps, I think that people simply can't sometimes understand what I'm talking about."

"As far as the China thing was concerned, I probably shouldn't have said that," Carson told The Post. "I said that on the basis of what some people in the CIA tell me. And of course, subsequent information came out that there is some Chinese [involvement in Syria]."

Carson is likely referring to a memo released by his campaign that laid out China's "longstanding and well-documented security ties to Syria." The statement suggested that, at the debate, Carson was referring to Chinese weapons — rather than troops or advisers — in Syria.

"They made it seem like I'm saying there are a bunch of Chinese boots on the ground," Carson told The Post. "Well, everybody knows that Chinese have physical characteristics that would make them pretty easy to identify in a setting like that. Give me a break. But they just jump on. That kind of stuff is frustrating."

Despite Carson's assurances that he wasn't referring to boots on the ground, top Carson adviser Armstrong Williams told Business Insider at the time that intelligence sources and military operatives in the Middle East told Carson that "Chinese military advisers are on the ground in Syria operating with Russia special-operations personnel."

In November, foreign-policy experts were skeptical of Carson's claims, even taking his campaign's explanation of the weapons involved in Syria into account.

"I'm deeply skeptical," Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group and author of the book "Superpower," told Business Insider in an email. "And of course, that's not what Carson was talking about in the debate — he was talking about direct China intervention."

"The broader point is that Ben Carson has no business talking about foreign policy," Bremmer continued. "It's impossible to imagine him making sense of all these issues over the course of a campaign cycle."

SEE ALSO: Ben Carson defended an odd claim about China and Syria he made during a GOP debate

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NOW WATCH: Business Insider's full interview with Jeb Bush

The leader of a powerful Syrian opposition group that had signaled its willingness to participate in a negotiated political process to end the war was killed in an airstrike on Friday, various media outlets reported.

Local activists say a Russian airstrike killed Zahran Alloush — the leader of a key rebel group operating around Damascus known as Jaysh al-Islam (Army of Islam) — though the Russia-backed Syrian regime has publicly taken credit for the attack.

In any case, experts say the airstrike that killed Alloush and several other Jaysh leaders was part of a larger strategy employed by Russia and the regime to turn military victories into diplomatic leverage ahead of negotiations over Syria's future.

Those talks are due to begin in late January. Until then, the goal is to back the rebels and their remaining supporters into a corner to bolster the position of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

"It's all part of the rules of engagement Russia wants to set up," Tony Badran, a Middle East expert and researcher at the Foundation for Defence of Democracies, told Business Insider on Saturday.

He continued:

Russia hits Jaysh al-Islam, forcing the group to decide between removing itself from the political process altogether — at which point it will be labeled a terrorist group — or coming to the table, emasculated, to talk to Assad. All while Russia reserves the right to strike the group.

Russia reserves this right, Badran argued, because Washington has waffled in negotiating a definitive list of terrorist groups in Syria — a contentious process that US Secretary of State John Kerry has delayed in order to ensure talks are not derailed before they even begin.

"Washington has given Moscow a huge political gift in not holding Russia accountable for its pattern of targeting moderate rebel groups and their leaders instead of ISIS," Badran said. "And Moscow is going to leverage it."

The UN, for its part, announced after Alloush's death that it would not let events on the ground "derail the fragile political process."

Under an agreement reached in Vienna in November, negotiations between the opposition and Assad's government will be followed closely by a cease-fire involving all parties except ISIS, Syrian al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra, and other groups listed as "terrorists" by Jordan, Russia, and the US-led coalition.

But a definitive list that all parties agree upon has yet to emerge, which means that Russia (which had reportedly placed Jaysh al-Islam on its own list of terrorist groups) and the regime (which considers all opposition factions to be terrorists) have been able to target certain groups with impunity — even if these rebels, such as Jaysh al-Islam, have signaled a willingness to come to the table.

Alloush's death came one month after members of Jaysh al-Islam, whose primary base of operations are the Damascus neighborhoods of Douma and Eastern Ghouta,participated in the Riyadh conference in Saudi Arabia. It was the most serious attempt yet to unify Syria's fragmented opposition into a cohesive political entity capable of negotiating with Assad.

Members of Jaysh signed the conference statement, indicating a degree of commitment to the political process. Whether Alloush's death derails that commitment remains to be seen. But Russia and the regime have already signaled that they intend to break the rebel groups as much as possible in order to maintain the upper hand in negotiations.

"If you're Putin or Assad, these are part of your strategic calculations," Badran said. "The thinking goes, 'If you don't sit and shut up, you're going to be eliminated.'"

Indeed, in a statement released online following Alloush's death, a member of the opposition Syrian Coalition, Burhan Ghalioun, said that"the assassination of Zahran Alloush, who officially agreed to engage in negotiations with the Assad regime, is a clear message to the Syrian opposition as a whole that the talks about a political solution are just a verbal hoax."

He added: "The assassination also means that the Russians and Assad have already taken a decision to liquidate all rebel leaders."

Labib Nahhas, a senior member of the powerful rebel Syrian brigade Ahrar al-Sham, echoed this sentiment to The Associated Press.

"The martyrdom of Sheikh Zahran Alloush should be a turning point in the history of the revolution," he said. "And rebel groups should realize they are facing a war of extermination by Putin's regime."

Hassan Hassan, a Middle East expert and coauthor of the book "ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror," had a more optimistic outlook. He wrote in The National on Sunday that Alloush's death "might deflate existing tensions" among the various rebel factions in Syria.

"It will also probably increase military cooperation, which was recently undermined by disagreements, rivalry and measured hostility," he added.

How Alloush's death affects rebel unity on the ground remains to be seen. But whether the opposition bands together or remains fragmented, opts out of the political process or sits at the table, one thing remains clear: Its members and leaders will continue getting hit.

"Russia wants to establish a precedent to kiss a nationwide ceasefire goodbye," Badran said. "So it is putting pressure on these rebel groups to get them to say, 'The hell with this — if I'm going to get killed anyway, I'm not going to do it while negotiating with Assad.'"

SEE ALSO: 'We've never been bombed like this': Russia's military campaign in Syria has escalated to new levels

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NOW WATCH: Chilling predictions for what the world will look like in a decade

The past year has been incredibly tumultuous for the Middle East. 

Political upheaval is still roiling throughout the region since the Arab Spring, and wars have continued to grind on in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Libya.

But despite the conflict, life continues in this region where 257 million people call home. 

We have put together some of the most illustrative photos taken in the Middle East this year.

SEE ALSO: The 50 most unforgettable photos of 2015

In this March 12 photo, a man looks at the rubble of buildings destroyed in the clashes between ISIS militants and Kurdish armed groups in the center of the Syrian town of Kobani.

In this Monday, March 30, 2015 photo, Iraqi security forces launch a rocket against Islamic State extremist positions during clashes in Tikrit, 80 miles north of Baghdad, Iraq. Iraqi forces retook the city on April 17, 2015.

In this Friday, April 24, 2015 photo, an Egyptian youth carries a lit flare as supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood gather in the El-Mataria neighborhood of Cairo, Egypt, to protest the 20-year sentence for ousted president Mohammed Morsi and verdicts against other prominent figures of the Brotherhood.

The Iraqi army will need Kurdish fighters' help to retake Mosul, the largest city under the control of Islamic State, Iraqi Finance Minister Hoshiyar Zebari said, with the planned offensive expected to be very challenging.

Mosul, 250 miles north of Baghdad, has been designated by the government as the next target for Iraq's armed forces after they retook the western city of Ramadi.

"Mosul needs good planning, preparations, commitment from all the key players," Zebari, a Kurd, said in an interview on Monday in Baghdad.

"Peshmerga is a major force — you cannot do Mosul without peshmerga," he told Reuters, referring to the armed forces of Iraqi Kurdistan, an autonomous northern region close to Mosul.

The mostly Sunni city had a population of 2 million before it fell to the militants last June in the first stage of their sweeping advance through northern and western Iraq.

The battle of Mosul would be "very, very challenging," Zebari said. "It will not be an easy operation, for some time they have been strengthening themselves, but it's doable."

Given the extent of the area that needs to be secured around Mosul during the attack, the army may also need to draw, in support roles, on local Sunni forces and possibly the Shi'ite Popular Mobilization, he said.

The Mobilization, known in Arabic as Hashid Shaabi, is a loosely knit coalition of Iran-backed Shi'ite militias set up to fight Islamic State. It was barred from the week-long battle to retake Ramadi to avoid tension with the Sunni population.

The retaking of Ramadi by Iraq's army marked the first major success of the US-trained force that initially fled in the face of Islamic State's advance 18 months ago.

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said on Monday that Islamic State would be defeated in 2016, with the army planning to move on Mosul.

"We are coming to liberate Mosul and it will be the fatal and final blow to Daesh," he said in speech praising the army's "victory" in Ramadi.

Retaking Mosul would effectively mark the end of the caliphate proclaimed by Islamic State in adjacent Sunni areas of Iraq and Syria, according to Zebari.

"It's there where Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared his caliphate," he said, referring to the group's leader. "It is literally their capital."

The Iraqi Kurdish president, Massoud Barzani, discussed plans for the liberation of Mosul with Lt. Gen. Tom Beckett, Britain's senior defense adviser, in September, according to Kurdish TV Rudaw.

(Editing by Louise Ireland)

SEE ALSO: Here's the biggest sign ISIS will be weakened in 2016

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ISIS might have proven its ability to wage complex attacks around the world in 2015.

But in the heart of its "caliphate" in Iraq and Syria, the group suffered at least one important setback: losing a substantial portion of its oil-exports income, according to the Iraq Oil Report.

Without the major source of revenue and foreign currency, the group might have a reduced ability to maintain the appearance of state-like services and functions inside the caliphate, potentially harming its ability to hold on to territory as global efforts against the group intensify.

The Iraq Oil Report's December 28 story is one of the most detailed accounts of the jihadist group's oil infrastructure that's publicly available. It's based on interviews with over a dozen people living in ISIS-controlled areas, including anonymous oil-sector workers. The story also includes descriptions of documents from the nearly 7 terabytes of data seized from the compound of Abu Sayyaf, the ISIS oil chief for Syria killed in a US Special Forces raid in May.

The story provides a mixed picture of ISIS's oil resources 16 months after the start of a US-led bombing campaign against the group.

The US was slow to understand the strategic value of targeting ISIS's oil infrastructure, viewing oil platforms, refineries, and vehicles "as a financial target with less battlefield urgency, rather than military targets," according to Iraq Oil Report.

Even with the loss of nearly all of its oil fields in Iraq, ISIS still controls a single conventional refinery in the country, in Qayyarah, near Mosul.

Less efficient open-pit refining techniques and continued control of oil fields in Syria mean that fuel prices within the Islamic State have stabilized somewhat in parts of the caliphate after fluctuating wildly over the past year and a half.

The report contains one piece of evidence that the Middle East may be well past the heyday of the ISIS oil economy. ISIS's once formidable oil-export economy, which used to produce $40 million in revenue a month for the group, has all but evaporated.

As the story recounts, ISIS oil exports were once a highly centralized operation, with middlemen like tanker-truck drivers paying about $10 to $20 per barrel at the point of sale.

ISIS would then recuperate the apparent discount on the barrel of oil through a series of tightly imposed transit taxes. The oil would hit the Turkish market through truckers or ISIS officials bribing officials in either Turkey or Iraqi Kurdistan.

The caliphate's oil industry was staffed using 1,600 workers, most of whom were recruited from around the world. Because of global disruptions to the oil industry, even an illicit non-state group like ISIS didn't have trouble running an international recruiting drive for skilled labor, as workers were "enticed with 'globally competitive' salaries at a time when the oil industry was undergoing waves of layoffs."

Those days are apparently over.

US airstrikes have destroyed hundreds of ISIS-linked tanker trucks and cut into ISIS's refining capacity. Low global oil prices have made smuggling a losing business proposition as well, especially in light of fuel shortages within the caliphate itself.

"The group can no longer generate enough fuel to comfortably meet demand within its own territory, as evidenced by high and volatile prices: there is virtually nothing left to export," the article states. "Global crude prices are now so low that, even if smugglers were able to cross international borders, the expense of the trip - measured in fuel, time, and bribes - would likely erase any profits."

Overall, the export business is "defunct," the Iraq Oil Report states, and the article pushes back against "press reports" suggesting that ISIS is "financed through smuggling routes that have been largely dormant for more than a year."

It's unclear what kind of impact the sustained absence of oil-export revenue will have on ISIS in the coming year. The group lost approximately 14% of its territory in Syria in 2015 and was reportedly dislodged from the center of Ramadi, about 75 miles away from the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, earlier this week.

At the same time, ISIS has proven remarkably resilient, keeping control over a large swath of Iraq and Syria despite a handful of battlefield defeats and the loss of its oil exports. And as the Iraq Oil Report article says, ISIS's control over territory stems from the weakness of the Iraqi state and the alienation of Iraq's Sunni minority from the government in Baghdad. The loss of ISIS's oil revenue doesn't solve the deeper, underlying problems that enable the group's control over so much of the country.

Still, reduced exports cut off ISIS's access to foreign currency and reduces its ability to provide social services to people living under the group's control — something that undermines its claim to ruling over a state-like political entity. It's highly unlikely that ISIS will ever reconstitute the $1 million-a-day-type revenue streams it was able to establish by mid-2014.

The reported end of large-scale ISIS oil exports also shows that the US-led campaign against ISIS has at least fulfilled one strategic objective, even as the group continues to hold substantial territory and carry out attacks around the world.

SEE ALSO: Here's what the next big Middle East crisis could look like

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NOW WATCH: Animated map shows the spread of ISIS through Iraq and Syria

PBS news series "Frontline" showed a side of Syria that Americans have never seen.

The documentary, "Inside Assad's Syria," opens with young Syrians drinking and dancing at a rooftop bar in Damascus, which seems unfathomable with the contrasting footage of constant bombing and tank fighting going on in the capital city. It also shows lavish resorts, wealthy Syrians enjoying the Mediterranean beach, and regime loyalists attending the national symphony.

You can watch the full episode on PBS.

Story by Allan Smith and editing by Jeremy Dreyfuss

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RIYADH (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia and Turkey agreed on the need to set up a "strategic cooperation council" to strengthen military, economic and investment cooperation between the two countries, Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir said on Tuesday.

"The meeting produced a desire to set up a high-level strategic cooperation council between the two countries," Jubeir told a joint news conference with his Turkish counterpart after talks in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, between Saudi King Abdullah and Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan.

He said the council will deal with security, military, economic, trade, energy and investment between the two countries.

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A Kurdish militia with ties to an organization waging an insurgency in Turkey's southeast region violated Turkey's "red line" in Syria over the weekend by crossing the Euphrates River during an anti-ISIS operation.

The operation to take back Tishrin Dam from ISIS was staged by the Western-backed Syrian Democratic Forces and spearheaded by the Kurdish YPG — the military arm of the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD).

It served as a huge blow to ISIS, which had relied on the dam to move weapons and fighters between its de-facto capital of Raqqa in Syria and the cities of Manbij and Jarablous it controls in the northern countryside of Aleppo Province.

But ISIS was not the only loser. The operation was also a major affront to Turkey, which declared the Euphrates a "red line"for Kurdish territorial expansion over the summer. Indeed, Turkey struck the YPG twice in October after it defied Ankara's warning not to cross the river.

So far, however, the Turks' response to the weekend incident has been relatively muted. When asked for his reaction to the Tishrin operation, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said in a news conference in Serbia that Turkey "would not look positively on Syrian forces hostile to Ankara moving to the west of the Euphrates," according to a translation by Reuters.

He added, however, that available information indicated that it was Arab forces, and not Kurds, who had crossed the Euphrates over the weekend.

This appears to be a half-truth. A small percentage of the SDF — roughly 4,000 of about 55,000 fighters — is made up of Arab groups operating as part of the SDF alliance under the joint name of the Syrian Arab Coalition. But the vast majority of SDF soldiers are more experienced fighters from the Kurdish YPG.

Aykan Erdemir, a nonresident senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and former member of Turkish Parliament, said he thinks Davutoglu's subdued response to the operation was his way of "accepting the inevitable."

"A harsher response on Davutoglu's part would have been an admission of failure to guard his 'red line,'" Erdemir told Business Insider on Tuesday. "By portraying the event as crossing of the Euphrates River by Arab forces, he is attempting to reframe the embarrassing developments to make them appear less damaging."

Davutoglu, along with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, harbor the fear that any movement west of the river might allow the Kurds to link their self-declared cantons, or territories, in northern Syria and create an autonomous Kurdish state along the Turkish border.

Indeed, the capture of Tishrin is "a huge first step for the Kurds in clearing out the remaining border strip controlled by IS along the Turkish border,"Wladimir van Wilgenburg, a Kurdish affairs expert embedded in Iraqi Kurdistan, told Business Insider on Tuesday, referring to an alternate acronym for ISIS.

"The Turks were opposed to this," he added, "and it was my understanding that the US understood Turkish concerns and therefore also opposed YPG advances."

But the SDF operation, spearheaded by the Kurds, was reportedly aided by several US airstrikes west of the Euphrates near Manbij.

Merve Tahiroglu, a research associate focusing on Turkey at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said Davutoglu's comments "are an example of how Turkey is able to maintain its 'red line' without appearing to completely impede the anti-ISIS coalition’s efforts along its border."

Tahiroglu added:

One worry in Ankara since the diplomatic crisis with Moscow last month has been Russian support for the [Kurdish] PYD and, in particular, a possible PYD movement toward the west of the Euphrates with Russian encouragement and air support.

Turkey has suffered a near-total defeat of its Syria policy since Russia entered the war on the side of the regime in September.

Russia's bombing campaign in the north, which escalated in the wake of Turkey's downing of a Russian warplane last month, has set the stage for the Kurds to continue advancing westward toward the strategically important city of Azaz.

That goal is even more attainable now that the YPG has crossed the Euphrates — with minimal condemnation from Turkey.

Turkey had been using Azaz as a corridor to funnel weapons and aid to the rebels it supports in Aleppo, but Russia's entry into the fray has dramatically limited Ankara's ability to change facts on the ground. That is perhaps one major reason why Davutoglu has tried so hard to reframe the Kurdish victory as an Arab one.

"Davutoglu is aware that he has very limited options to unilaterally intervene in the Syrian scene to back his 'red line,' so he is avoiding bold statements he can't back with action," said Erdemir, the former Turkish Parliament member.

Still, Tahiroglu said, because the Tishrin operation was supported by the US and not Russia, it was not a complete "nightmare scenario" for Turkey.

"But the question now," she added, "is who in the SDF will come to control this liberated land: the Arabs or the Kurds?"

SEE ALSO: The epicenter of the Syrian war is shifting — and it could mean 'a near total defeat' for Turkey's Syria policy

DON'T MISS: Turkey is 'setting up cards' for a dangerous new game with Russia, and the winner could be ISIS

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NOW WATCH: Hard to forget this 2015 video of Putin and his prime minister working out for the cameras