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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.
Let's start World War III over a piece of land in the middle east we all gave fuck-all about five years ago.
Didn't we elect someone to get us the hell out of some sandy region where everyone hates everyone else, and the only people they hate more is anyone who shows up to help? Are we really going to do this all over again with the advisers and the airstrikes and then another Iraq/Libya/Egypt clusterfuck?
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.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
It makes me sick to see the phrase, "Western-backed rebel forces". These are Islamists. When Russia says they're only going after the terrorists, they aren't lying. See, there aren't two sides in Syria's civil war, there are three (major ones). There is Assad's government, who represent a minority that would get massacred if they ever lose power (Russia is backing them), the Islamist rebels (we're backing them *puke*), and ISIS (against everyone). There aren't any good guys. The Syrians who want Western democracy? Laughable.
It continues to amaze me, year after year, all the journalists who simply do not comprehend that there are three (major) sides in the battle. When Russia bombs the Islamists, this is nothing more than a proxy war. Putin thinks Obama is finished, weak, and America is ready to be swept aside. This is all Obama's own fault, of course, for his miserable failure during the Syrian nerve gas crisis of 2013. His "red line" was shown to be nothing that anyone need be afraid of. Russia saw weakness and swooped in. According to Putin, this was America's "Suez Moment" and without it Russia would today not be in the civil war and NATO wouldn't have just shot down one of their aircraft.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
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!
There are no "moderate" rebels.
They are islamists. The only "moderates" are in hotels in Turkey; They have no power and are nicknamed the "five star opposition" because of the five star hotels they live in. For the Russians, a beardie is a beardie.
There is neither "the Russians are bombing moderates while they promised to bomb DAESH" They said form the start there were no moderate islamists and even joked they bombed moderate islamists with moderated bombs "which have more pleasant colors".
Turkey and Saudi Arabia are backing Al Nosra which is a local branch of Al Quaeda. And UK and particularly France with that idiot Laurent Fabius timidly backs them to please the Gulf states so they buy them weapons. Airplanes in particular. Against the advices of their own military. It is changing but slowly.
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.
There are more than two sides. It's not just ISIS vs Assad. I am not saying there are any clean hands, but you are taking an absurdly reductionist view of the conflict.
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.
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.
Flight radar track on downed warplane issued by Turkish military via CNN Türk
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.
The Russians won't do anything to retaliate. I have a healthy respect for Russia and most people should. I grew up during the Cold War not too far from the former Soviet Union. I used to watch the Soviet submarines off the coast when I was a teenager. They would surface occasionally. My father purchased a powerful maritime telescope for my brother and I to see them better when they did surface. Once, a submarine surfaced and broadcasted an emergency. One of the crew suffered a burst appendix. Our guys sent out a helicopter and collected him and took him to hospital where he stayed for two day's time. The submarine waited off the coast, but was joined by 24 hour patrol helicopters and a frigate escort. This was 1983.
The Russians are good people, their military is very capable, and while some of their equipment might be a generation or so behind the West, make no mistakes in thinking this limits them. Russia and Putin have something the West doesn't have at present: will and intent. It doesn't matter why Russia is in Syria, although to my estimation, they are protecting their oil and gas pipeline interests (present and future) through Iran to Syria.
I rather admire Vladimir Putin for his nationalism and his refusal to play nice with islamists. His duty is to kill them and that he will do. Unlike the West, Russia is actually killing ISIS and other islamists and this is to be praised.
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?
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.
....Turkey shoots you for Thanksgiving!
Honestly, 325 posts and nobody pulled this out?
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Honestly, Turkey doesn't belong in NATO any more. NATO too needs to redefine its mission, or dissolve quietly. It's now nearing 25 years since the Cold War ended, and so NATO's mission needs to be redefined.
If Communism was the enemy in the last millenium, Islam is the enemy in this one, and NATO needs to recognize that and act accordingly. If they won't do it, then it's time for them to wind up. Turkey is not going to take the side of NATO against its Muslim comrades in Syria or anywhere else. Just like they refused to let the US fly over their space during the last US invasion of Iraq. It might take the side of the Saudis in an Islamic campaign somewhere, but that's it.