Jets shot down, invasion threatened
Dogfights raged in the skies over northwest Syria yesterday, with two Assad regime fighter jets shot down by Turkey and three Turkish drones attacked in return.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened a full-blown invasion of Syria and indicated he was determined to set up a Turkish-run ‘‘safe zone’’, after trying earlier to involve Europe and Nato by sending thousands of refugees to the border with Greece, where many became trapped in no-man’s land.
Turkish armed forces, which have established bases across rebel-held Idlib, struck deep into regime territory in a series of attacks at the weekend.
On Friday night 34 Turkish troops were killed in an airstrike; Turkey responded with drone and artillery attacks, killing scores of Assad regime fighters and destroying at least two airfields.
According to Ankara, a chemical weapons research facility near Aleppo was hit and two regime generals were killed.
The Assad regime confirmed yesterday that two of its Sukhoi Su-24 jets had been shot down by the Turkish air force, which is equipped with US-made F-16s. Russia is thought to have taken a decision to ground its warplanes in the area to allow Turkey to ‘‘regain face’’ and retaliate for Friday’s losses.
A key question yesterday, however, was how long President Vladimir Putin would allow the regime to take punishment. Under the cover of Turkey’s strikes, rebel fighters and jihadists have staged a series of counter-attacks in recent days, reclaiming some of the ground lost to the regime offensive in Idlib.
A Kremlin spokesman said that Putin had finally agreed to a meeting later this week with Erdogan.
There have been regular reports of Russian jets attacking
Turkish positions in recent weeks. and suspicions that they were behind Friday’s air strikes. But Ankara insisted that it had no grievance with Moscow. ‘‘We have neither the intention nor the notion to face Russia,’’ Hulusi Akar, the defence minister, said. ‘‘Our only intention is for the regime to end the massacre and prevent radicalisation and migration.’’
He claimed that his troops had destroyed more than 100 regime tanks, along with artillery and air defences. He called the incursion ‘‘Operation Spring Shield’’; the aim of which could be to establish an area in northwestern Syria to keep Idlib’s millions of civilians safe and stop them crossing the border.
Deepening Turkish involvement on the side of the rebels in Idlib, their last stronghold in Syria, has brought Ankara to its most dangerous confrontation with Moscow since November 2015, when a Russian jet was shot down as it crossed briefly into Turkish air space.
Erdogan and Putin, likeminded in their autocratic domestic politics and anti-western rhetoric, agreed at that time to cooperate over Syria. Over the next three years they engineered several ceasefires; gradually the regime has retaken rebel-held, non-Kurdish territory, squeezing rebels and 3.5 million civilians into Idlib.
Erdogan decided to take action in recent weeks as a million more refugees headed towards the Turkish border, acting on an earlier threat that if the regime did not withdraw to the 2018 ceasefire lines by March 1 he would send in troops to force it to do so.
A counter-attack by rebels and jihadists, under the protection of the Turkish drone onslaught, has retaken key towns, including Nayrab and Saraqeb. Regime air bases at Nayrab and Kweiris, near Aleppo, were said to have been put out of action by Turkish strikes.
The losses to regime forces have been significant: in Lebanon, videos showed streams of minibuses bringing dead and injured Hezbollah fighters over the border and into the Bekaa valley. The militia group, which has been fighting on the side of the Assad regime, said yesterday that eight of its troops had been killed in the Turkish attacks. Five Hezbollah fighters were buried with military honours by crowds of thousands in south Beirut yesterday afternoon.
Iran, which oversees the involvement of Hezbollah as well as Iraqi, Pakistani and Afghan Shia militias, issued a warning to Turkey yesterday through its ‘‘consultative centre in Syria’’, the first acknowledgement of such a body. – The Times