The defence ministry said in a statement that Russia’s Admiral Essen and Admiral Grigorovich warships and the Krasnodar submarine in the eastern Mediterranean fired six Kalibr missiles at command centres 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 IS 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 IS fighters and their facilities.”

The most recent such strikes were announced by the ministry on May 31, aimed at targets around Palmyra.

The defence ministry on Friday said that IS this week has been moving forces into Hama province under cover of night and using large buildings there as command points and weapons stores. It said this was part of attempts to move out from Raqa towards Palmyra.

Four Gulf Arab States demanded on Friday that Qatar reduce ties with Iran, halt military cooperation with Turkey and shut the Al Jazeera TV channel, media reported.

The list of conditions Doha needs to meet in order to mend ties with regional powers was reportedly passed on earlier in the day by Kuwait, which is mediating the dispute.

The Financial Times, which saw the 13-point list, said Qatar has been given ten days to comply with the requirements, including the immediate shutdown of the Turkish military base on its soil and the Doha-based Al Jazeera as well as affiliated channels.

Other conditions include publicly denouncing relations with Islamist groups, an end to terror financing and the handover of people designated as terrorists by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt.

The four states, led by Saudi Arabia, severed diplomatic ties with Qatar on 5 June after accusing it of funding extremism and destabilizing the Middle East. The nations then embargoed all sea, air and land traffic to the country, triggering food shortages.

Iraqi government forces killed on Thursday an Islamic State explosives official while moving inside a district adjacent to Mosul’s Old City, the group’s last bastion, like reported by iraqinews.com .

Shafaq News quoted security sources saying that troops killed Abu Furqan al-Maswseli along with 15 others at a house in al-Shifa district.

The Iraqi command said earlier this week its forces had consummated the recapture of al-Shifa, a home to major health and medical facilities, thus putting the medieval Old City under full siege.

Also on Thursday, Federal Police chief Shaker Jawdat said his forces killed 43 Islamic State members in Ras al-Jada and Bab al-Beed in the old city, and destroyed five booby-trapped vehicles.

Iraqi troops have advanced on Wednesday closer to the Grand Nuri al-Kabir Mosque, where Islamic State’s supreme leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared the establishment of the group’s rule in 2014. IS members blew up the mosque’s ancient minaret on Wednesday as troops advanced, a move which the Iraqi command said signalled an imminent defeat to the extremist group.

A few hundred militants are thought to remain inside the Old City, but are holding at least 100.000 civilians who are shot dead or caught and executed while trying to flee the neighborhood.

Western-backed Syrian opposition fighters holding a strategic swathe of the desert southeast stretching to the Iraqi border said they came under major attack on Tuesday from regime forces and allied Iranian-backed militias supported by Russian air power, like reported by arabnews.com.

They said hundreds of troops with dozens of armored vehicles including tanks had surged into the Bir Qassab area some 75 km southeast of Damascus toward the Badia region that skirts the borders with Jordan and Iraq.

Bir Qassab straddles the route to the eastern suburbs of Damascus, near the Dumeir air base, which is also a key opposition supply line toward areas they control further southeast.

“The (Syrian) regime and militia ground attack started this dawn and our forces are holding on to their positions,” said Saad Al-Haj, spokesman for Osoud Al-Sharqiya, one of the largest opposition groups operating in the area.

Russia accused the US-led coalition of “complicity with terrorism” after an American warplane downed a drone operated by pro-regime forces in southern Syria.

“In Syria this type of strike is akin to complicity with terrorism,” Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told the Interfax news agency.

The Iranian-made drone was downed Tuesday, just days after a US warplane shot down a Syrian regime fighter jet in the country’s north.

In Tuesday’s incident, the US-led coalition said an F-15E Strike Eagle jet destroyed an armed Shahed-129 drone in the early hours of the morning as it neared Al-Tanf base along Syria’s eastern border. “It displayed hostile intent and advanced on coalition forces,” the statement said.

In another development, the US military confirmed it killed a top Daesh cleric in an airstrike. Central Command said Turki Al-Binali was killed on May 31. Activists and Daesh supporters reported his death at the time, but the military is only confirming it now.

Meanwhile, US senators called on Congress to take back its authority to determine whether the country goes to war, saying recent US strikes in Syria were not covered by existing authorizations for the use of military force.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has begun considering legislation that would cover military action in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya and Yemen against Daesh, Al-Qaeda and other militant groups.

Iran’s missile attack on Islamic State targets in Syria on Sunday was by all accounts, a resounding failure. Of the seven missiles fired at the ISIS-held Syrian town of Deir el-Zour, only two were reported to have reached their target.

Three of the rockets fell outside Syrian territory, in Iraq, while the remaining two fell somewhere inside Syria, missing their targets by many kilometers.

Iran used seven ground-to-ground mid-range Zulfiqar missiles. These new missiles were considered to be extremely accurate. Furthermore, while the possible firing range of the missiles is thought to extend to between seven hundred and eight hundred kilometers, Sunday’s missiles only travelled four-hundred-and-fifty kilometers to their targets.

Israeli military sources told Haaretz that the operational results of the Iranian missile attack was “a great deal less impressive than the media noise being made in Iran around the launch.”

On Monday, Iran announced that its missile attack on the Islamic State was not only in response to the jihadist attacks in Tehran, but were also meant as a message to Saudi Arabia and the United States.

The attack marked the first time in fifteen years that Iran has used such missiles, and the first time it has used such weaponry in the Syrian civil war. Tehran supports and is providing assistance to Syrian regime leader, Bashar al-Assad.

The Houthi militias and their allies among the followers of ousted President Ali Abdullah Saleh have warned that they will attack strategic military bases deep within Saudi Arabia that have been used to launch attacks against them in Yemen, Safa news agency reported according to middleeastmonitor.com.

“The military choices for the army and the popular committees are open for carrying out responses in all fields in response to the crimes of the Saudi-American coalition,” said the spokesman of the militias, Sharaf Ghalib Luqman. “Today, our military capabilities are better than at any time previously. We are reinforcing the new reality on the ground aiming to undermine the movement and attacks of the enemy from all of its strategic military bases inside Saudi Arabia, which are being used to launch military attacks on Yemen.”

The military spokesman did not give more details about the nature of such possible attacks inside Saudi Arabia. However, over the past two years the Houthis and their allies have targeted military bases in the Saudi governorates of Assir and Najran on several occasions.

On Tuesday, Iraqi security forces stormed the Dekka Baraka area within the Old City district of Mosul and managed to clear it from Islamic State (IS) militants, like reported by basnews.com.

The forces were also able to recapture Bab Lakish from the grip of the militants.

Colonel Khudair Saleh from Nineveh police told BasNews “Iraqi Federal Police forces killed 30 IS suicide bombers, including a suicide bomber of Russian nationality, during the push into the Dekka Baraka and Bab Lakish areas”.

“The two areas have been completely freed from the grip of the IS terrorists,” he added.

Colonel Saleh also stated that the IS media deputy minister known as Uday Hamdun was killed by the Iraqi Air Force in the Old City district.

He revealed that seven civilians were killed and three others wounded as a result of the wrong bombing of Iraqi forces in Maidan area in the centre of Mosul.

Unknown individuals beheaded a cameraman operating within the Islamic State’s main media agency in southwestern Kirkuk, a source said Tuesday.

The source told Alsumaria News that a cameraman working for Amaq News Agency, Islamic State’s media arm, was found beheaded at a country road in al-Riyadh, southwest of the province.

IS members were put in alert to search for the attackers, according to the source.

Al-Riyadh and other neighboring areas in southwest Kirkuk have been under Islamic State control since 2014, when the group emerged to proclaim an Islamic “caliphate” in Iraq and Syria. The group executed dozens of civilians and security members there, forcing thousands to flee homes.

Local tribal leaders and politicians from Kirkuk have mounted pressure on the Iraqi government to hasten with invading Hawija, suggesting that its people were experiencing a humanitarian crisis under the group’s rule. The Iraqi government is currently employing the largest portion of its military effort in Mosul, IS’s capital in Iraq where the group is reportedly cornered in a few square kilometers.

Several anonymous attacks against IS members have been reported over the past months since Iraqi forces, backed by a U.S.-led coalition, launched a campaign to retake areas occupied by IS militants.

Russia’s defense ministry says it is suspending coordination with the United States in Syria over so-called “de-confliction zones” after the Americans downed a Syrian government fighter jet, like reported by aranews.net .

The United States and Russia, which has been providing an air cover for Syria’s President Bashar Assad since 2015 in his offensive against ISIS, have a standing agreement that should prevent in-the-air incidents involving US and Russia jets engaged in operations in Syria.

The Russian defense ministry said in a statement on Monday that it was suspending the deal after the US military confirmed that it downed a Syrian Air Force fighter jet on Sunday after it dropped bombs near US partner forces.

The ministry says it views the incident as Washington’s “deliberate failure to make good on its commitments” under the de-confliction deal.

On Sunday, the US-led coalition confirmed to ARA News that they shot down a Syrian regime jet that attacked positions of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in the vicinity of Tabqa town in Raqqa province.

“At approximately 4:30 p.m. Syria time, June 18, Pro-Syrian regime forces attacked the Syrian Democratic Forces-held town of Ja’Din, south of Tabqa, wounding a number of SDF fighters and driving the SDF from the town,” the coalition said.

“Coalition aircraft conducted a show of force and stopped the initial pro-regime advance toward the SDF-controlled town. Following the Pro-Syrian forces attack, the Coalition contacted its Russian counterparts by telephone via an established ‘de-confliction line’ to de-escalate the situation and stop the firing,” a spokesperson for the US-led coalition told ARA News.

“The Coalition presence in Syria addresses the imminent threat ISIS in Syria poses globally. The demonstrated hostile intent and actions of pro-regime forces toward Coalition and partner forces in Syria conducting legitimate counter-ISIS operations will not be tolerated,” the coalition said.

Supported by the US-led coalition, Iraqi forces on Sunday began storming the ISIS-held Old City of Mosul, like reported by aranews.net .

The district is the last stronghold of Islamic State’s (ISIS) militants in Mosul city, in Iraq’s northwestern Nineveh province.

“Iraqi forces early this morning breach into old Mosul, the final ISIS-held district in the city,” said Brett McGurk, the US envoy to the international coalition fighting ISIS.

“We are proud to stand with them [Iraqi forces],” McGurk tweeted on Sunday.

According to reports, the Old City of Mosul is a densely-populated maze of narrow alleyways, where fighting is often conducted house by house.

The US-backed Iraqi forces have been combatting ISIS in Mosul for nearly eight months, in a campaign considered to be the largest against the radical group in Iraq.

Mosul has been the major stronghold for ISIS in Iraq since June 2014.

In the meantime, the United Nations reported that about 100,000 civilians remain trapped in the ISIS-held Old City district, living in harrowing conditions, with little food, water and medicine and limited access to hospitals.