Make no mistake: the potential consequences of Turkey’s decision to shoot a Russian fighter jet out of the sky for allegedly violating its airspace near the Syrian border are profoundly chilling.
This unprecedented act by Turkey — the first time in 50 years a Nato country has brought down a Russian jet — is extraordinarily provocative.
in the coming days and weeks we are far more likely to witness dramatically escalating tensions between Russia and the Nato alliance, of which Turkey is a key member.
slamist-ruled Turkey is strongly opposed to Russia’s ally, the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and has been long accused of duplicitously backing Islamic State.
But even those in diplomatic circles will be aghast at the situation’s rapid deterioration.
For adding to Russia’s outrage and humiliation, ethnic Turks inside Syria — who are allies of Turkey, enemies of the Assad regime and fierce opponents of Russian airstrikes — also, it seems, committed a blatant war crime, by shooting dead one of the two Russian pilots as they parachuted out.
These supposedly ‘moderate’ Turkmen rebels proceeded to celebrate by firing their machine guns in the air, while abusing the corpse of the pilot and screaming ‘Allahu Akbar’ (‘God is the greatest’) in Arabic.
Moreover, just hours after the shooting down of the Russian jet at the Syrian border, a Russian helicopter was downed in another part of Syria by the Western-sponsored Free Syrian Army, using an advanced surface-to-air missile of the kind supplied to them by the thousand by our Persian Gulf allies. Unsurprisingly, we are now menacingly being told that the Russian defence ministry is ‘devising a set of measures to respond to the incident’.
Yesterday, Obama seemed to justify Turkey’s downing of a Russian jet — reiterating, no doubt to Turkey’s delight, his belief that Russian strikes against ‘moderate’ Syrian opposition ‘only bolsters’ the Assad regime, whose brutality has helped fuel the rise of IS.
So how will Putin respond? Russia’s first retaliatory military act is likely to be a relentless assault on the Turkmen rebels. If and when that happens, for the first time since Russia’s incursion into Syria two months ago, the Russian air force will be brought into direct military conflict with the moderate rebels funded, trained and armed by the West and its allies.
This would occur just as dozens of American Special Forces arrive in Syria to embed themselves with those very same Western-backed anti-Assad rebels.
The prospect of Russia and the West engaging in this way in the military arena can only be met with horror.