Ukraine in Arabic | IS militants training pilots in captured jets
KYIV/Ukraine in Arabic/ Former Iraqi pilots who have now joined Islamic State (IS) militants in Syria are training members of the group to fly captured fighter jets, a group monitoring the war said on Friday.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said witnesses had seen the planes being flown around a military airport in Aleppo.
Meanwhile, Iraqi forces have launched an attack on IS militants near Tikrit.
The city was among the areas in Syria and Iraq seized by IS this year.
Rami Abdul Rahman, head of the SOHR, said IS was using Iraqi officers who were pilots under ex-Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to train fighters in Syria.
"People saw the flights, they went up many times from the airport and they are flying in the skies outside the airport and coming back," he said.
It is not known how many Iraqi pilots have defected.
Witnesses told the SOHR the planes appeared to be MiG-21 or MiG-23 models.
The BBC's Sally Nabil in Baghdad says IS has three planes which it captured earlier from the Syrian military in Aleppo and Raqqa.
Aleppo became a key battleground in the fight between Syrian rebels, which now include IS, and government forces after the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad in 2011.
New coordination
Separately, the Iraqi government said its troops had gained ground to the north and west of Tikrit and cut an important IS supply route.
Correspondents say that past efforts by the government to regain territory in the area have ended in failure.
Meanwhile Kurdish forces, backed by US-led air strikes, are continuing to fight militants in the northern Syrian town of Kobane.
US-led warplanes struck IS positions on Friday, taking advantage of new coordination with the town's Kurdish defenders, the SOHR said.
The battle for Kobane, which is also known as Ayn al-Arab, is regarded as a major test of whether the US-led coalition's air campaign can push back IS.
Activists say more than 600 people have been killed since the jihadist group launched its assault on the mainly Kurdish town a month ago.
More than 160,000 people have fled in the face of the IS advance.
Capturing the town would give the group unbroken control of a long stretch of the Syrian-Turkish border.
IS fighters have gained a reputation for brutal tactics, including mass killings and beheadings of soldiers and journalists.
