MOSCOW, October 1. /TASS/. Russia confines its antiterrorist military operation to Syria and any hypotheical ruminations about its possible territorial expansion are pointless, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Thursday.
"Nobody made statements on a possibility of this (expansion)," he said when a reporter asked him about a possible spread of the geography of Russian airstrikes beyond the Syrian borders.
"We said from the very beginning the case in hand was Syria," Peskov said.
"In this case, hypothetical formulations of any kind are totally out of place and there can be no discussion in this modality," he added answering a question about what Russia would do should it get a relevant request from Baghdad.
"For the time being, we state that the operation is carried out at Syria's request, at the request of the legitimate Syrian government," he said.
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No signals on expansion of anti-IS front yet
There have been no signals so far from the potential new parties to the front of struggle with the Islamic State terrorist grouping, Kremlin spokesman went on to say.
"At this stage, coordination is done at the center in Baghdad," he said, adding that the list of countries, which had delegated their representatives to the center, had not changed.
"There’s no more news about it right now," Peskov said.
Russia, Syria, Iran, and Iraq had set up an information center in Baghdad for coordinating the struggle with the Islamic State. The main functions of this the new coordinating entity is to gather, process, summarize, and analyze the current information on developments in the Middle East in the context of antiterrorist struggle, as well as to distribute it further to the addressees and to transmit it promptly to the General Staffs of the Armed Forces of the countries engaged.
Army officers of the four constituent countries will stand at the head of the center on the basis of rotation, each country for three months. In line with the initial agreements, the Iraqi side will be in charge of the center over the next three months.