War game changer: Russia’s launch of dozens of precision cruise missiles at Syria from 1500km away surprises military analysts

Russian forces supporting embattled Syrian President Bashar Assad have fired a volley of cruise missiles from ships based in the Caspian Sea into eastern Syria in an escalation of Russian involvement in the country’s brutal conflict.

The strikes, 26 in total on Wednesday and spanning almost 1,500km of precision flight, were by far the longest-range attack by Russian forces in modern history.

The cruise missiles flew over the Caucasus Mountains, Iran and Iraq before veering toward Islamic State-held areas, shocking military analysts who said they were unaware that the weapons had such long-range capability.

“We knew that both the Gepard frigate and Buyan corvettes were capable of launching land-attack cruise missiles, but the apparent range of the missiles has come as a surprise to us,” Jeremy Binnie, a weapons expert for Janes IHS, the London-based defence think tank, said, referring to two types of Russian ships.

The direction from which the attack occurred also was something of a surprise. While Western news media had reported Russia’s dispatch of four ships to the Mediterranean west of Syria in recent days, there had been little public notice of Russian ship deployments in the Caspian, a landlocked body of water bordered on all sides by Russian allies or former Soviet republics.

Navy Captain Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, said US military officials knew that the Russian fleet in the Caspian was equipped with cruise missiles, but he said he did not know if the Russians had notified Iraq, a US ally, that they would fly through its airspace. Iraq previously has permitted Iranian planes to overfly its territory to ferry supplies to the Assad government.