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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?
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.
Those parties are not really fighting amongst themselves; but they do have different interests in Syria. While their common goal is to fight IS, they each want to use this conflict as an opportunity to back their own horse in this race. Russia bombs the "moderate" rebels opposing Assad, while the rest likes to support those rebels. Meanwhile, Turkey bombs the Kurds.
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.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
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?
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.
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.