US, Russia, Turkey and Saudi Arabia hold Syria talks

Russia, the United States, Saudi Arabia and Turkey are slated to hold talks on the crisis in Syria on Friday.

The Vienna meeting, to be attended by top diplomates from Washington, Riyadh and Ankara – who all back groups battling against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad – comes days after the embattled Syrian leader made a surprise visit to Moscow to meet President Vladimir Putin.

Putin, a firm supporter of President Assad, began bombing opposition targets in Syria on 30 September. The aerial support has helped Assad to launch ground offensives on five fronts in recent weeks.

However, on Thursday, Putin suggested that the Syrian government might be willing to work with rebel groups to root out the Islamic State.

According to Putin, Assad answered “positively” when presented with the proposal.

"We are contemplating this and will try to implement it," Putin said during a meeting with dignitaries and media in the southern Russian resort town of Sochi.

Putin also reportedly called for Kurdish groups to join forces with Syrian and Iraqi government troops against IS.

Opposition groups though are highly unlikely to heed the call for cooperation, with Russian air strikes largely taking aim at non-IS groups. A Reuters’ analysis of Russian Defence Ministry data, conducted earlier this week, showed that almost 80 percent of Russia's declared targets in Syria were in areas not held by Islamic State.

“There is no need to play on words, to classify terrorists are moderate and non-moderate,” Putin said.

“What is the difference?” Putin said, suggesting that “in the opinion of some experts… so-called moderate bandits behead people moderately or gently.”

Russia's defence ministry said Thursday it had struck 72 "terrorist" targets in Syria over the past 24 hours, claiming to have destroyed the combat capability of the main militant groups operating in the country.

"As a result of Russian air strikes, the main forces of terrorist groups, made up of the best trained terrorists, have lost combat capability. Their command and resupply system has been disrupted," senior military official Andrei Kartapolov told Russian news agencies.

The US has called the Russian intervention “counter-productive”.

"The aim of the US is to get rid of Assad, probably that is so, our aim is to defeat terrorism, to battle terror, and to help President Assad claim victory over terror," Putin said Thursday.

"In this way, we can then create the conditions for the start and, I hope the successful reaching of a conclusion, of the political process to find a settlement."

More 250,000 people have been killed and millions forced to leave their homes since an uprising against Assad’s rule first began in 2011.