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Turkey Downs Allegedly Intruding Russian Fighter Near Syria Border (reuters.com)
jones_supa writes: Turkish fighter jets shot down a Russian Sukhoi SU-24 fighter near the Syrian border on Tuesday after repeated warnings over airspace violations. Moscow said it could prove the jet had not left Syrian air space. Footage from private Turkish broadcaster Haberturk TV showed the warplane going down in flames in a woodland area. Separate footage from Turkey's Anadolu Agency showed two pilots parachuting out of the jet before it crashed. A Syrian rebel group sent a video to Reuters that appeared to show one of the pilots immobile and badly wounded on the ground and an official from the group said he was dead. This is the first time a NATO member's armed forces have downed a Russian military aircraft since the 1950s. The Guardian is following the developments with live updates.
Also covered by the BBC, which notes Russian aircraft have flown hundreds of sorties over northern Syria since September. Moscow says they have targeted only "terrorists", but activists say its strikes have mainly hit Western-backed rebel groups. Turkey, a vehement opponent of Syria's president, has warned against violations of its airspace by Russian and Syrian aircraft. Last month, Ankara said Turkish F-16s had intercepted a Russian jet that crossed its border and two Turkish jets had been harassed by an unidentified Mig-29.
In Syria.
Moscow says they have targeted only "terrorists", but activists say its strikes have mainly hit Western-backed rebel groups.
I know the American media is still rock-hard in their slathering love-fest with the "Arab Spring" (or, as the the sane world knows it "The Radical Islamic Takeover"). But are you STILL so naive as to not realize that most of those "Western-backed rebel groups" are just Isis or their affiliates? Do you really think there are two anti-Assad rebel factions (one side Isis, one side "good" rebels) that are somehow able to find the time to fight one another?
Do the stupid-ass CIA agents handing out the guns to the rebels make them pinkie-promise that they're not Isis?
Because turkeys are stupid birds that don't know enough to come out of the rain and can barely fly. Obvious joke is obvious.
But does Turkey hate ISIS? The Kurds of northern Iraq have been one of the targets of ISIS, and every Kurd killed by ISIS is another Kurd that won't cause Turkey problems. Why do you think Turkey is the porous border that is allowing people and goods to flow into Iraq and Syria? Because they want ISIS to cause mayhem, kill lots of Kurds and send the message to Turkish Kurds that they'll happily send them to the slaughter too if anyone starts thinking about Greater Kurdistan again.
The Turks have never been allergic to the idea of genocide. Just look at the Ottoman genocide of ethnic Armenians during WWI. I'm sure if the Turkish government thought it could get away with it, it would kill every Kurd it could find
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Oh hey, speak of the devil, they just released a video of the hitting of the helicopter: link "Hard landing" my arse.
They'd really be nowhere today if it wasn't for those TOWs. They film every attack - footage and return of the tubes is apparently part of the deal to get more, to prevent them from stockpiling them or transferring them to other militias, so there's a couple new videos put out every day. Saudi Arabia reportedly purchased 13k of them from the US which it routes through Turkey in batches of a couple hundred at a time.
I hate to bring up our imminent arrest during your crazy time, but we gotta move.
Umm, we're backing the Kurds. Who are NOT "Islamist"....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
I shudder to think how WWII would have ended if the alliance powers had each worried so much about what the other sides would do AFTER they defeated Hitler that they refused to ally with one another to begin with.
Oh, believe me - they worried. Churchill openly worried about it (especially post-Yalta, where he saw that the UK got screwed pretty hard.) Roosevelt worried about it, though not as much... now post WWII, his big worry was that Gen. Patton would decide 'fuck it', and start a fight with the USSR anyway (just to get it out of the way).
Incidentally, there were more than a few tense crises between East and West (towards and at the end of WWII) that never really made the papers - the relative silence was only because back then, the government would tell the press to shut the hell up about something, and the press (more often than not) compliantly kept quiet about it.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
By the way, Russia has a long history of violating the airspace of other nations. I'm surprised there hasn't been such an incident earlier.
This is ironic considering Turkey lost an F-4 to Syrian air defence a couple of years ago after the Turkish aircraft violated Syrian airspace...
Flight radar track on downed warplane issued by Turkish military via CNN Türk
U.S., Iran, Turkey, Assad, Russia. All hate ISIS. All have an interest in destroying the ISIS "caliphate."
Can't stop fighting among themselves for even a minute to even consider an alliance.
Meanwhile, ISIS just slips across some other border that the side who happens to be fighting them at that moment can't cross.
Bullshit - Turkey has been supporting ISIS in many ways, including logistics, since the beginning. This includes free passage for ISIS fighters while blocking the passage of anti-ISIS forces. Turkey is also acting as a de-facto air force for ISIS, by bombing their most successful adversary, the Kurdish forces in Syria.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
If this claim is true, then Russians planes are shitty.
(I'm turkish),
The F-16 is a very capable fighter (especially when flown clean - that is, not weighed down with a LANTIRN pod or wing tanks). It's capable of sustained 9G maneuvers, and can even accelerate while flying straight up - which most jets cannot do. It has superior pilot visibility, has up to 9 hardpoints on which to mount armament, and there's a built-in 20mm cannon to boot (just behind the canopy on the right-hand side above the strake).
It may have been designed and built in the early-mid 1970s, but it was far ahead of its time, even back then. It was originally built as a 'cheap-but-plentiful' fighter (to compliment/support the expensive flagship F-15 fighters), but in the right hands, 'the little jet that could' turns out to be quite a little badass in its own right.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
The Russian violation was technical, according tothis morning's maps: in a flight across northern Syria, the SU-24 crossed a narrow finger of Turkish land sticking out of its southern border. The shootdown was over Syria, the crash was in Syria, and the crew were killed by Syrians after ejecting.
There's a very good documentary about this called "Return to Homs", which everyone should see: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt31...
It shows how secular protests turn into massacre and then to desperate fight for survival. They received no support from outside world, other than from the islamists (who had plenty of weapons and supplies, likely sponsored by such countries as Bahrain and Saudi Arabia). You can guess the rest.
Watch it and then come here to say that they had a choice. I think that most western young people can easily relate to people shown in the film. They are not that different from us.
It's really not, at least among the major players. In the north (where the most relevant fronts are, even if there is still lots of random fighting elsewhere) you have Daesh in the east, the YPG (kurdish "Peoples' Defense Units") to the north of them, and JaF (Jaish al-Fatah, "Army of Conquest")/FSA alliance in the center (down to just north of Hama, and edging into Latakia by the Turkish border). The FSA has many different brigades but they're all pretty unified by wanting to fight Assad and Daesh and being composed of members who explicitly didn't join the (formerly much more powerful) Islamist militias. JaF is comprised of a number of militias, mostly islamist, the two most powerful being Ahrar ash-Sham ("Supporters of the Levant") and Jabhat al-Nusra ("The Support Front for the People of the Levant").
Let's break down the players.
The YPG, opposed by Turkey (out of fear of links to the PKK), controls a long strip along Turkey's northeast border, as well as a couple of pockets west of there. They have a long border with Daesh territory and fight almost exclusively against Daesh (even though there's one or two Assad pockets within their territory). Recently they've launched a major anti-Daesh campaign, using US-supplied weapons, in an alliance with Arab anti-Daesh forces, under the banner of Syrian Democratic Forces. So far it seems to be progressing well.
Daesh (aka IS/ISIS/IL) is, of course, Daesh. A group of Islamists so radical that even al-Qaeda thinks they're nuts. That said, it should be reiterated that not everyone who fights for them shares their ideology. They literally do run what is effectively a state, with locally sourced money (based around oil pumping, refining with truck-mounted mini-refineries, and sales - both domestic, to Turkey (black market), and even to Assad, who they're vehemently against. This money funds a militia far larger than their ideological base, often made up of the poor and displaced in the conflict who need the work. That said, literally armed entitity who's not part of Daesh in this conflict is an enemy of Daesh, so it's hard to imagine them surviving in the long run.
The FSA was once the largest fighting force in early post-revolution Syria, but atrophied to a lack of financing and weaponry, becoming a paper tiger. Since 2014 however a joint US/Saudi/Turkey program under the auspices of the CIA (not to be confused with the gigantic-failure Pentagon program) has funnelled them a basically unlimited supply of TOWs, which they've been making good use of - their kill rate is reportedly about 6 out of 7 fired. Their numbers have increased since then. So far they seem to have managed their assets quite well, with reports stating that only 2 (some say 4) have fallen into other hands (Jabhat al-Nusra), and they seem to have used them. FSA works closely with JaF but is not part of the alliance itself.
Jaish al-Fatah is as mentioned a coalition, largely Islamist, although its individual members vary significantly. Let's go into the two biggest ones.
Ahrar ash-Sham can be thought of as sort of like the Muslim Brotherhood: Islamist, supporting sharia, but locally focused. Saudi Arabia and Qatar seem to have this group as their favored dog in the game.
Jabhat al-Nusra is a branch of al-Qaeda operating in Syria. Strangely despite this they haven't been behaving very much like al-Qaeda usually does, and they've been a very effective force against both Assad and Daesh. While they still take part in things like suicide bombings and human shields, they have a policy of not taking any anti-western activity and have worked hard to try to not engender local resentment, such as not imposing sharia on Christian towns. Qatar has been reportedly working to try to get them to break with al-Qaeda, but so far this campaign has not yielded any fruit. A large chunk of al-Nusra's fighters are foreign volunteers attracted by the name and they would risk losing them if they were to break with al-Qaeda.
JaF is really tricky on how one should deal with it. Ahra
I hate to bring up our imminent arrest during your crazy time, but we gotta move.
Oh yeah, the Treaty of Sèvres.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Ha. The USA made a wholesale business of such violations against the USSR with virtually no retaliation in kind. This little-known secret campaign began in 1946. There were losses, killed and imprisoned, kept secret. B-29s and Lockheed P2Vs were used; later C-130s and B-66s. By the 1950s, B-47 bombers were being repeatedly sent on deep penetration reconnaissance missions. Then came the U-2s. Francis Gary Powers' ill-fated spy flight was far from the only such.
All told more than 40 US aircraft invading Soviet aircraft were shot down. Question: can you identify a single Soviet or Russian aircraft which was ever shot down over US territory? As far as I know they have never violated it; certainly not systematically and purposefully.
Incidents of Russian aircraft probing the US which are drummed up as provocative are no more than Russians exercising their perfect right to range in international airspace "near" (gasp) to US territory.
The Kurds want to break away, ISIS wants to take over and bring Turkey under the Caliphate.
That's not quite it. The Turkish regime knows that the world will eventually get around to squashing ISIS, so from their perspective a sovereign Kurdistan is the more pressing problem. Not by any means justifying that point of view, just drawing attention to the twisted dynamic.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I don't think you understand what the word "good" means.
I fucking sure you don't understand what the term "just as good" means.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
And your expertize comes from where?
We all form our ideas based on the information we have. All networks and people are biased. CNN was just busted editing Trump to make it look like he was talking about Muslim databases by editing out him talking about the wall and border security.
Ten years or so ago it was common for Russian Bear bombers to overfly Alaska. Our jets would scramble from McGrath and Elmendorf to intercept. Russian jets would turn and go home when intercepted. It seemed they where trying to see how far they could get before being intercepted.
One important reason of the destabilization of the area near and including Syria, is to get Putin's influence out of Syria and put Biden's in.
Qatar wants to sell its gas to Europe through a pipeline through Syria, but Assad wants Putin to supply his gas to Europe. So Saudi-Arabia buys a lot of Toyota's while USA (McCain) supplies weapons for some fanatics that were trained and supported by the USA to fight the Russians in Afghanistan.
Of course you can't simply dismiss these people without expecting some major problems, so they are now directed at Assad after a brief period in Lybia.
Saudi-Arabia already saw that the USA was fracking too much and made that a losing proposition by lowering the oil prices through oversupply.
Further, as Brzezinsky writes in his book, the US, in order to maintain its hegemony as a superpower, has to do anything it can to prevent other powers become too strong and successful. Creating chaos is one way of obtaining that goal so no, I don't think the USA would reduce its presence there if there were no oil.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
And you lost me when you said oil, and helpers in the congo...
The US DOES have "helpers" in Africa-- when it comes to training, we actually spend more money and send more units there. We train nearly twice as many people in Sub-Saharan Africa compared to the Middle east and North Africa combined. source
Also note that special forces deployments are 10x what they were in Africa ten years ago, while presence in the middle east is actually going down. source
I know you want to make this about OIL, but I think this is a gross simplification. Even if it were about oil, none of this would apply to Syria, which is not a large producer. source
I'm not saying that oil companies have no influence in our government (I'm sure they do--- just like military contractors and a myriad other huge industries in the US and the world influence probably every part of our lives and governments) but the US is training and policing all sorts of areas of the world, regardless of whether or not they fit some predetermined "OMG OIL" narrative. Is this a great idea? Honestly I have no idea, I'm sure some citizens are happy to have the US intervene just as sure as some will hate us for it.
This a million times over. The three most recent examples being South Korea, Japan and Germany. In all instances we are still there more than half a century later. Well OK I am British so we are not technically in South Korea or Japan these days, but we still have bases in Germany 70 years later.
That only works if the host nation is willing to be your buddy and ally. In the middle east, everybody hates each other. They hate the USA too, to a slightly smaller extent. Any politician in that region can score political points by pot-shotting the US, and bringing the various groups together in their shared distain for the USA. If you're a politician in a country that has serious issues, you'd be foolish to not try deflecting blame and anger at an overseas country. It works 90% of the time. Keep in mind that many of the borders in the middle east were drawn not based on culture or religious differences, or around old and established borders. They were drawn up after the end of WWI by France and the UK with a ruler.
The only reason we got away with it in Japan and Germany was because both countries were completely and utterly destroyed. The remaining leaders could take the carrot and play ball, resign, or refuse to play ball and be forcibly removed and/or accused of war crimes. There was not much choice.
Korea was a completely different situation. The Korean war has not officially ended, so being best buddies with the #1 military power in the world made sense, and still makes sense, no matter the cost.
Given that there are several wealthy countries in the middle east waging proxy wars for their own selfish reasons, sectarian civil wars, the whole "new cold war" dynamic shaping up, plus widespread terrorism against basically any kind of target, civilian or military, a Japan/Germany style occupation can not work in the middle east. It probably never could.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
You were implying that the fact that the Barbary pirates were Muslims had nothing to do w/ it. But the fact that they demanded that the new country convert to Islam clearly contradicts that contention of yours. It's not a question of whether America is or was Christian. It's the fact that you had those savages then, and you have these savages now, who demand that you either convert to Islam or accept dhimmi status under Shariah law or get killed in war. Those are your 3 options.
And no, not every religion of even those times demanded that others convert to them. Most notable being the Mongols and Shamanism. Or Zoroastrianism w/ the Persians. After Iran became Islamic, some new converts wanted to revert to their old religion, but the remaining Zoroastrian population wouldn't take them back, since that was forbidden. Similarly, even Judaism demands a lot of effort before a person is accepted into the religion. Roman Catholicism and Islam were the only religions of the time that had any degree of coercion in them.