Obama: Russia action in Syria is 'recipe for disaster'

US President Barack Obama has warned Russia that its bombing campaign to support Syrian President Bashar al-Assad will suck Moscow into a quagmire that will be hard to get out of.

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Obama said Russia was also failing to distinguish between Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) fighters and more moderate rebels in Syria.

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Russia continued bombing Syria on Friday for a third straight day. Targets have included ISIL's main stronghold in Raqqa, but also the provinces of Hama, Aleppo  and Idlib where few ISIL fighters operate.

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Obama said he would not turn the Syrian civil war into a "proxy war" between the US and Russia. 

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Russian President Vladimir Putin's decision to launch strikes on Syria marks a dramatic escalation of foreign involvement in a more than four-year-old civil war in which every major country in the region has a stake.

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Earlier, Russia said it had launched fresh air strikes against ISIL in Syria.

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At least 12 members of ISIL group were killed in Russia's first air strikes on Raqqa, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Friday.

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Activists on the ground said that the majority of the attacks hit civiians, a claim that Moscow denies.

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Washington and its allies have asked Russia to stop its strikes on targets other than ISIL, as Russia's lower house said the air strike campaign over Syria could last three to four months.

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Obama, who met Putin at the UN earlier this week, said he was willing to work with Moscow to broker a political solution that involved the Syrian president stepping down, but would not cooperate with a Russian campaign that targets the moderate opposition.

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Meanwhile, the UN said it had been forced to suspend planned humanitarian operations in parts of Syria due to the fighting.

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More than four million people have fled the Syrian conflict, with hundreds of thousands heading to Europe, which is now facing its worst migrant crisis since World War II.