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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.
From the ISIL "Welcome to the Caliphate!" brochure:
Getting attacked by Russians or Assad? Head to Iraq. The U.S. won't let your attackers cross the border.
Getting attacked by Americans or Iraqis? Head to Syria. Russia/Assad won't let your attackers cross the border.
In doubt? Go to Turkey. They won't let ANYONE cross the border!
No Mig-29 has ever locked a Turkish plane in the region. The Russians have none there. A F-16's RWR (Radio Warning Reciever) cannot distinguish easily between a MiG-29 or Su-30 or Su-27 radar.
According to the data the Turks themselves have provided, the Russian plane was in Syria save for a very brief instant (5-20 seconds depending the airspeed of the Su-24). This is normal in operations. Small strays at the bad side of a border are common and are not worthy of an incident. If the Su-24 had been in a straight line towards the deep inside of Turkey then it should have been intercepted -not shot down- and either escorted outside of the airspace or sternly asked to land on some Turkish military airfield pending diplomatic exchange between the two nations.
And you don't "warn multiple times" a plane in 20 seconds.
The Turks are clearly looking for war with Russia for whatever reason. Or their political leaders do not realise Russia is not Armenia and they are going to react. They will think it trough but it won't be pretty.
Until now, if you watch the images of Russian planes in Syria, you see they fly with old air-air missiles (R-27s) which show they didn't really expect anyone would be dumb enough to start a fight with them. That is going to change.
I hope NATO will stay out of this. If they start a WW3, I desert. I won't fight or even pay taxes for islamists.
There's an old curse that seems relevant: "May you live in interesting times." Times are certainly interesting. At this point, it seems like some sort of full-scale war between NATO and Russia is more likely now than it has been any time since the 1980s (granted then it would have been NATO against the USSR but the basic point is the same). Worse, at least historically the military and diplomats spent much of their time making sure that things didn't spiral out of control. Without the Cold War feeling, people may feel less of a need to guard against such issues. Worse, Russian military doctrine currently describes a limited nuclear strike on conventional military targets as a de-escalation http://thebulletin.org/why-russia-calls-limited-nuclear-strike-de-escalation . While in official documents they reserve that terminology for using nuclear weapons to handle direct conventional military attacks on Russia itself, one finds very worrying the level of doublethink where one describes being the first to use nukes as de-escalating a situation.
During the Cold War, one popular explanation for the Fermi paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox, the apparent lack of highly advanced civilizations in the universe, was that species end up blowing themselves up. For most of my life, this belief looked almost quaint but it is not looking disturbingly likely. At this point, the evidence for some sort of serious barrier to civilizations emerging substantially is much stronger than it was a few decades ago. The apparent lack of K3 or K2.5 civilizations is at this point substantially robust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale with around 100,000 galaxies searched and almost no sign of any civilization using a substantial fraction of its galactic energy output http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/alien-supercivilizations-absent-from-100-000-nearby-galaxies/. With this return to Cold War norms, it looks like we need to not only take seriously that there's a Great Filter, but that the Filter might be nuclear war. That's especially the case because a nuclear war does not need to kill every member of the civilization to completely destroy any hope of a technologically advanced civilization. If not enough natural resources have been consumed by the civilization (e.g. the easily accessible coal and oil) then even if the species survives it may not have the ability to reboot itself to a high tech level since getting to a high tech level may actually require access to these resources (in which case one gets essentially one chance to get to be a high tech civilization).
Almost 50% (content varies) of ISIS/ISIL are former Ba'athist that we paid not to fight against us in post Saddam Iraq.
Like that was a great idea!
>> look where that naive world view got us
Except he didn't implement it. Obama dicked around with the Iraqi government and fucked up the withdrawal from Iraq, then "regime changed" Libya and Egypt in another fuck-up, then had to "reinvade" Iraq in an ongoing fuck-up and is now dicking around with Syria in still another fuck-up with a French aftermath.
I don't think Russia is so much of an idiot as to give the Kurds anti-aircraft systems. Because Turkey would respond by giving the FSA anti-aircraft systems. Which would be far more devastating due to how close the Russian airbase near Latakia is to opposition troops and how Russia's been focusing so much on close air support, as well as the ratios of assets in the region that could be employed if necessary (Turkey and the other coalition states have far, far more)
Russia's also at real risk of facing a heavy dose of irony. As the battle front has spread deeper into Latakia (yes, Russia/Iran/Hezbollah/Assad has lost ground in Assad's heartland since the Russian/Iranian surge) it's increasingly violent in Jabal al-Turkuman, aka the Turkman Mountains, aka an area to a large indigenous Turkic population. The Russian strikes there have stirred up anger in Turkey (probably no doubt a contributor to Turkey being a bit more trigger-happy on their antiaircraft missiles than usual), and in recent days pictures have started emerging of members of far-right parties in Turkeys that have crossed over to Syria and taken up arms. This has the potential to involve into a mirror of the situation in Donbas.
BTW, and back to the original topic - why are so few people covering the helicopter downing in Syria? Look it up: one of the helicopters in Latakia on search and rescue mission for the plane crew went down. The rebels say that they hit it with a TOW. Russia says that it underwent a "hard landing", but that the crew is okay.
Oh, and we still have Israel continuing to be a wildcard, having launched several strikes inside Syria again just the other day, in the heels of last week's attack on the Damascus airport. They seem determined to stop Iran and Russia from transferring advanced weapons to Hezbollah at any cost.
I hate to bring up our imminent arrest during your crazy time, but we gotta move.
This
We have an opportunity to forge an alliance between former enemies. The only reason the USSR and America were adversaries was the conflict over economic systems. that conflict no longer exists. Russia us just as capitalistic as the West, albeit a but more crude about it. But the point is that we have no reason to automatically line up against then anymore.
We have an opportunity to create a partnership that exceeds Nato and present a united front against Islamic Radicalism. This means not only immolating ISIS terrorists, but also, diplomatically confronting the bigger players in the Mideast that are the ones actually fueling his kind of crap with their fundamentalist nonsense. We could force them all to clean up their act, and reform Islam.
Of course, the US will need to stop supporting "moderates", mostly because there is no such thing.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Not true, there are lots of Syrians who want Western Democracy.
The problem is, they are all leaving to live in a actual western democracy.
Which leaves Syria with the rest.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
Nooo... I once was driving through Plano, Texas, turning right when I should have turned left. My local friend told me to stop and put on my left blinker. When I did so, the other four lanes of cars stopped and waved me through. Craziest damn thing I ever saw. I have never met anyone nicer than a Texan.
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.
Right, but the same applies to Russia too. Russia is pretending to bomb ISIS "terrorists" in Syria, and yet for every hundred bombing raids it's done only one has actually been against ISIS and ISIS territory. The other strikes have hit everything from al Qaeda off-shoots, which we'd probably agree is fair play, through to Kurds and Turkmenis who just want to be left the fuck alone in their particular pocket of Syria just because they also oppose Assad.
The net result is that just as the Turks were indirectly helping ISIS by fucking over the Kurds, Russia is indirectly helping ISIS by targetting everyone who isn't ISIS and Assad - and those people happen to be enemies of ISIS too.
As the GP said, the whole situation is a mess. Effectively you have Russia defending Assad, Turkey defending people fighting against Assad but not the Kurds, the Kurds fighting ISIS, and the rest of the coalition, Iraq, and Iran also fighting ISIS.
The Russian intervention would be far more helpful than Turkey's interventions to date if Russia was actually attacking ISIS full on, but given that it's doing more damage to one of ISIS' many sets of opponents than it is ISIS then it's doing more to help ISIS than hurt it right now, which has much been the case with Turkey to date when it was fucking the Kurds whilst they were trying to fight ISIS as you say.
No one is directly supporting ISIS, but Russia, Turkey, and a couple of the Gulf states are most definitely indirectly supporting ISIS with their actions and all are doing so to pursue their own geopolitical ambitions - Russia to give the West no choice but to back Assad or ISIS rather than leave any group to back on the broad spectrum in between the two, Turkey to fuck the Kurds because it doesn't want Kurdistan to exist even if as part of Syrian territory, and Qatar et. al. because it's a useful proxy to battle Iranian influence with.
The rest of the Western coalition, Iraq and to some degree Iran is at least is fighting ISIS to destroy ISIS rather than for any other overriding reason, but they're doing so in such a half arsed manner that it's wholly ineffective. Whether we like it or not, we need boots on the ground if we actually really want to defeat them - we managed to deploy 1 million troops to Iraq in 1991, if we just got it over and done with with one mass deployment like that again we could eradicate them incredibly quickly and cleanly, instead we seem now to prefer to drag this things on forever with pointless little deployments that can't ever hope to achieve anything. I'd wager whatever the massive upfront cost of such a mass deployment not seen since '91 it's still massively cheaper in terms of monetary cost and lives lost than these pointless little deployments that do nothing other than poke the hornets nest. If we're not willing to do it and do it right like that then we should leave it the fuck alone altogether. What we're doing right now is the worst possible option - we're wasting money to achieve nothing.
The only reason ISIS exists still is because just about every country in the world right now is apparently run by some fucking retard or another that can't see past their own geopolitical ambitions at the bigger picture. One minute they're all "Aww, poor France, we absolutely must act and destroy ISIS", and the next they're "Turks!", or "Kurds!", or "Russians!". It's like the world is being run by kids with ADHD who can't focus on an issue for more than a few minutes before they get distracted.
Please run for president, or at least go explain to the president what a reasonable strategy might be. Based on your understanding, which is more thorough than 99.9% of people's, what do you think would be a reasonable strategy for the US going forward, considering the end game?
It seems pretty clear we don't want Daesh in control of the territory; which group(s) can we support which have a reasonable chance of establishing some stable control and aren't barbaric, and how should we be doing that? As a voter who hasn't heard of most of the groups you mentioned, what main point(s) do I need to hear from a candidate to think he or she might have stumbled on a reasonable approach?
There aren't any good guys. The Syrians who want Western democracy? Laughable
This is wrong at best, and bordering on malicious. You only have to hop on Twitter and follow a few Syrian accounts to see the truth, in all its complexity.
Even saying there are three sides is a vast oversimplification. The simplest way to explain it is that most of Syria has decided that Assad is no longer an acceptable ruler. Other than that, everything is a dizzying array of faction. The two biggest factions are those who disagree and want Assad to stay on, and ISIS. That still leaves out most of Syria though, and that vast swath of people is not united on anything other than that Assad doesn't rule them.
Are some of those people Islamists? You betcha. Some are also supporters of democracy. Some are ethnic separatists. The ones fighting ISIS most effectively right now are Kurds. Some are Turkish clients, and fight Kurds more than ISIS. Some are just psychpaths who like having guns and shooting people. And lots and lots of people just want to live their lives free of fear, and don't really give much of a crap about politics outside of that (just like here in the US).
I had this thought too. "WTF does Turkey have that can shoot down a Russian plane?" And the answer is that the target wasn't their air superiority Su-35 (which looks awesome btw), it was a Su-24 a long-range interdiction fighter made to go behind enemy lines and blow up supply trucks. It was shot down by an F-16* which is made for air superiority. Even if hostilities were made apparent and the two forces actually struggled, I'd still put money on the tool made for the job. The Su-24 isn't quite as air-insuperior as an A-2 warthog, but it's along those lines.
But I don't even know if there was a struggle. The Russians may have just been waving their dick about believing that no one in their right mind would poke the bear. They might have simply sat their while they got shot down.
*Which is an old bird right? But this isn't two first-world nations going at it. And while we have 195 F-22s, there are more like 4500 F-16s in the world. And there are about to be an ungodly number of cheaper drones. The cutting edge weapons we have will never really be used. The things which see action will be the workhorses and the cheaper-end products of yesteryear.
The conflict in Iraq is special because the U.S. precipitated it. I was against invading Iraq, but once we did it I was absolutely committed to staying there until it was stable. While Saddam Hussein was a monster, like most monsters his grip on power provided a good deal of stability. Removing him also removed that stability, so we had a moral duty to stay there until a comparable level of stability was restored. Unfortunately, a majority of the U.S. just wanted out quickly regardless of stability and the consequences, and elected a President who promised just that and delivered. What we're seeing now with ISIS is the consequence of shirking our responsibility to fix what we broke, and not withdrawing from Iraq until it could provide its own stability.
Did you know U.S. inteventionist policies were born from Muslim acts against the U.S.? You've probably heard the opening line of the Marine Corps anthem:
From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli...
The Montezuma part makes sense. The U.S. fought several wars with Mexico, so of course the Marines would be involved. But Tripoli? That's way over in Libya (that's Africa for those weak in geography). What the hell were U.S. Marines doing there?
Funny you should ask. Way back in 1800 when the U.S. was a freshly minted nation, it ran into a problem. Prior to the revolution, the U.S. was a British colony, and thus fell under British protection. When the U.S. gained independence, it lost that protection. The Muslim Barbary States decided to take advantage of the situation and began capturing U.S. merchant ships and holding the crews for ransom. Their thinking was that since these people weren't Muslim, it was ok to kidnap them and extort a ransom.
The fledgling U.S. had its own domestic problems and didn't want to meddle with things going on in other countries. But it didn't have a navy which could deal with the situation, and attempts to negotiate a treaty with France to protect U.S. vessels fell through. So for the first few years, the U.S. just paid the ransom. Of course paying criminals just encourages them, and it became open season on U.S. flagged vessels. Eventually the payments became exorbitant, and the U.S. recommissioned a navy. President Thomas Jefferson (y'know, the guy who wrote famous things like, "We hold these truths to be self evident - that all men are created equal") launched a military operation to Africa to end the kidnappings and free the hostages.
That is how the U.S. Marines ended up in Tripoli. That is how U.S. meddling with foreign nations began. Because a bunch of Muslims decided to take advantage of a fledgling non-Muslim nation by kidnapping its citizens and demanding ransom for their freedom. So if you want to play the blame game, the first incident, the precipitating act which began over two centuries of animosity, was actually committed by Muslims against the U.S.