With all the election BS dominating the media these days, the Civil war & ISIS advances in Syria have fallen by the wayside. However since Russia jumped in to prop up the Al Assad regime, things have changed in that theater of conflict in the wacky world of the Middle East.
There is no doubt that Russia's first interest is keeping Assad in power so as to maintain their Naval base at Tartarus and to keep Saudi Arabia and Qatar from building natural gas lines to Turkey which would threaten Russia's stranglehold on natural gas supply to Europe. ISIS (or Da'esh, pick the name you like) has only been able to make the gains they have in Syria (1/3 of the country) by exploiting the civil war that cropped up about 5 years ago. Russia is hammering the non-ISIS groups so that Assad can get his act together and then concentrate on ISIS.
A good strategy no matter what you think of Assad or Putin.
For the moment it seems that Russia and Iran have come together in order to stabilize the region to their mutual benefit. For a medium range time-frame this works well for Russia and for the long range it works well for Iran. It works out very poorly for both the USA and Saudi Arabia. With China's economy currently taking a tumble at the moment, Russia can concentrate on propping up his economic future by hurting the Saudi's, whose current price war in what has apparently been a very successful campaign against Shale Oil, are his biggest economic enemy.
As for the USA, like it or not we've become bit players in the region.
The link below is to an article as to the current state of military operations in Syria by Russia.
http://www.mail.com/news/world/4083736-assads-battlefield-gains-cast-cloud-upcoming-syria-talks.html#.7518-stage-hero1-6
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