Militants training in jets?
A group says captured Syrian planes are flying with the help of former Iraqi air force pilots.
BEIRUT, Lebanon - The Islamic State group is test flying, with the help of former Iraqi air force pilots, several fighter jets captured earlier from air bases belonging to the Syrian military, a Syrian activist group said Friday.
The report by the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights could not be independently confirmed, and U.S. officials said they had no reports of IS militants flying jets in support of their forces on the ground.
The new development came as the Islamic State in Iraq pressed its offensive on the strategic city of Ramadi, west of Baghdad.
The militants appeared to be taking advantage of the focus of U.S.-led airstrikes on the Syrian Kurdish city of Kobani, along the border with Turkey, to concentrate on their second front in Iraq.
The Observatory said the planes, seen flying over the Jarrah air base in the countryside of Aleppo province in eastern Syria this week, are believed to be MiG-21 and MiG-23 jets. Rami Abdurrahman, director of the Observatory, said the planes have been flying at a low altitude, "apparently to avoid being detected by Syrian military radar in the area."
He described the flights as a "moral victory" for the Islamic State group, saying "the jets could not fly much further without being knocked down by the [international] coalition."
The report on the IS flights in Aleppo added yet another layer of complexity to the Mideast crisis amid the onslaught by the Islamic State militants.
The U.S. and its allies are bombing IS bases in Syria and Iraq, where the extremists have seized large swaths of territory.
During its blitz, the Islamic State is known to have seized fighter jets from at least one air base it captured from the Syrian army in the eastern Raqqa province earlier this year. Militant websites had posted pictures of IS fighters posing next to the fighter jets, but it was unclear whether they were operational.
Abdurrahman said Islamic State members were being trained by Iraqi officers who had joined the group and who were once pilots under Saddam Hussein.
In January, Islamic State militants also captured the Jarrah air base in Syria after bitter clashes with rival extremists and Syrian rebel groups.
A mix of several Islamic rebel groups battling Syrian President Bashar al-Assad - including al-Qaeda's Syrian branch, the Nusra Front - had seized the base from government troops in early 2013.
Gen. Lloyd Austin, the top U.S. commander for the Middle East, said he has no operational reports of IS militants flying jets in support of their forces on the ground.
Austin, the head of U.S. Central Command who is directing the fight in Iraq and Syria, told Pentagon reporters that he also has no information about Iraqi pilots defecting to IS.