According to him, the offensive has been launched from several directions at once.
"We've already managed to take under control 1,500 square kilometers of territory, hundreds of farms, a village, 400 oil wells, which were used by terrorists to sell oil to Turkey," the army spokesman said in an interview with Sputnik Arabic.
Commenting on the success of the Syrian forces, the officer stressed that the Russian Air Forces provided considerable assistance to the Syrian Army and attacked the columns of Daesh terrorists.
"The Syrian army is preparing for an operation to regain control of the al-Tabqa air base [located in Raqqa province]. Russian aviation will provide assistance from the air," the officer said.
In his turn, a representative of Kurdish self-defense forces, Nuri Mehmud, told Sputnik that Daesh is using Raqqa residents as human shields.
"Daesh terrorists are surrounded. Therefore, they use civilians as human shields, as they repeatedly did [before]. Because of the presence of civilians in Raqqa, our forces have to act very carefully. They move forward very slowly as we want to avoid civilian casualties. At the same time, we continue to conduct operations to save civilians from the captivity of terrorists. So far, we have managed to save tens of thousands of people from Daesh," Mehmud said.
Raqqa has remained under Daesh control since 2013, and is considered the de facto capital of the terrorist group. The Syrian Armed Forces have been fighting on Raqqa's outskirts for several months.
On Sunday, the Iraqi armed forces retook another terrorist-captured city, Mosul in northern Iraq, where the creation of Daesh was first declared in 2014.
