Turkey’s president said Saturday his country will take “necessary,” but unspecified, action against Syria, a day after Damascus said it had brought down a Turkish military plane near the volatile border between the two countries.
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Abdullah Gul said that Turkey was still trying to establish the exact circumstances of the incident and whether the jet may have been brought down in Turkish territory.
Regional security may hinge on the details that emerge from this incident, which comes at the tense moment when the Syrian regime has lost control in large parts of the countryside and blames Turkey for assisting rebels. Friday saw another spate of news about Syrian military defections, a mass killing and weapons smuggled into rebel enclaves from Turkey.
Turkish authorities said they lost contact with an F-4 Phantom around noon on Friday about 13 kilometres from the port of Latakia, but initially seemed reluctant to blame Syria for shooting down the jet.
In the early hours of Saturday morning, however, the Syrian state news agency SANA released a bulletin in English, French and Arabic saying that security forces had fired on an unidentified aircraft over Syrian territory.
“An unidentified aerial target violated Syrian airspace, coming from the west at a very low altitude and at high speed over territorial waters,” the agency said.
The Syrian government said its anti-aircraft artillery hit the plane about one kilometre offshore before it crashed farther out in the Mediterranean.
“The target turned out to be a Turkish military plane,” the news agency said.
Turkey held a two-hour meeting of top security officials on Friday night; a terse statement afterward said that Turkey understood its plane had been shot down by Syrian forces and promised, without elaborating, that Ankara “will determinedly take necessary steps” in response.
Earlier in the day, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the fate of the jet and crew remains unknown. He also emphasized that whatever brought down the aircraft may have happened some distance from the place where it eventually crashed, perhaps indicating that Turkey did not intend an aerial incursion.
“It would be very significant, and unprecedented, if Turkey intentionally violated Syrian airspace,” said Elizabeth O'Bagy, an Arabic-speaking Syria analyst at the Washington-based U.S. Institute for the Study of War. “I personally don't think that's likely, considering the stakes.”
Syria has some of the best air defences in the Middle East. An analysis published by Sean O'Connor, an expert at the think tank Air Power Australia, shows that Syria has early-warning radar with visibility deep inside Turkey; this could have alerted Syrian officials about the plane's approach when it was roughly half the distance from its reported takeoff location, the Erhac military base in the eastern province of Malatya, to the spot off the coast where the plane disappeared.
Witnesses told BBC Arabic they saw a plane shot down by Syrian air defences near the town of Ras al-Basit, north of Latakia near the mountainous border. Some local media reports described two foreign jets, one of which escaped.
Turkey and Syria have been uneasy rivals for much of their history, but Mr. Erdogan made a point of mending ties in recent years with trade agreements and a personal friendship with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Relations between the two countries, and leaders themselves, broke down in 2011 when the Syrian regime started killing members of an uprising whose strength comes from the Sunni Muslim community – the same branch of Islam to which Mr. Erdogan and a majority of Turks also belong.
After two buses carrying Turkish pilgrims were attacked inside Syria in November, Mr. Erdogan declared that Mr. al-Assad must quit: “You can remain in power with tanks and cannons only up to a certain point,” the Turkish leader said at the time.
Some regional media claimed that Syria shot down the Turkish plane in response to an embarrassing defection earlier in the week, in which a Syrian pilot flew his MiG-21 warplane into Jordan and claimed asylum.
The incident has also sparked a flurry of reports of tension around Syria's skies.
“We're seeing more talk about a lockdown of air spaces,” Ms. O'Bagy said.
If the Turkish jet was the first foreign aircraft shot down in the Syrian conflict, the incident would serve as a reminder that the Assad regime has much stronger air defences than the former Libyan dictatorship, a factor which may be discouraging a Libya-style intervention.
The rising tensions along Syria's borders on Friday were accompanied by a series of reports about more battles between rebels and regime forces, including the emergence of a grisly video that the government claimed as evidence of a “massacre” by rebels in the northern province of Aleppo. The footage shows more than a dozen bloody corpses, some piled on top of each other and wearing Syrian uniforms.
A Syrian activist group also reported further defections on Friday, releasing a video claiming to show two brigadier-generals and two colonels who joined the opposition.
The Guardian newspaper cited unnamed sources saying that Saudi Arabia is planning to pay regular salaries for Syrian rebels, funnelling the money via Turkey.
With a file from The Associated Press
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