Its reporter in Aleppo, Damien McElroy, said rebels have vowed to try again to seize the Menagh airbase: The fall of the Minagh base, which lies 30 miles beyond the city limits, could prove a turning point, the rebels hope.
The real answer to our avoidance of the "g" word is less than 30 miles up the road from Tarsus: the massive Incirlik airbase, used by the US air force and the RAF.
Rebels failed to capture a military airbase outside Aleppo despite using captured tanks to attack it, the Telegraph reports.
The general was reported to have said: "We're going to move it over there and going to start running some air ops out of it," referring to plans to switch from the Prince Sultan airbase in Saudi Arabia to Qatar's al-Udeid base.
Turkey's governing neo-Islamists have so far resisted pressure to let coalition planes use the Incirlik airbase in southern Turkey for strikes against IS targets in Syria, partly for fear of retaliation against its men at Suleyman Shah's tomb.
The need for such deterrence is a strategic concern which outweighs Syria in Washington's estimation, at least for the time being.Other strike fighters and support aircraft could fly from Incirlik, a NATO airbase in southern Turkey, and from the British base at Akrotiri in Cyprus.
A little further on is Zimbabwe's main military airbase, where pilots used to train for the Battle of Britain.
Mr Babanov's stallion, his detractors allege, was a gift from a Turkish company that won a Pentagon construction contract at the Manas airbase outside Bishkek, the capital, used to ferry American soldiers in and out of Afghanistan.
Now, despite a flurry of diplomatic gaffes when he was merely prime minister, the tycoon turned politician seems to be confounding them.This week he enjoyed basking in the global sunlight at a meeting between NATO leaders and the American and Russian presidents at a seaside airbase near Rome.
"WELCOME to Freedom's Frontier," reads a wooden sign at the pine-clad headquarters of America's Manas airbase in Kyrgyzstan.
The recent American agreement with Japan to move some American marines from Okinawa, despite the failure as yet to agree about the future of the Futenma airbase, seemed a face-saving way of putting off a difficult decision.
