NATO missiles in Turkey help limit spread of conflict
ADANA, TURKEY — As bloody as the war inside Syria is, it would suddenly get much bigger and much more complicated politically if a Syrian tactical ballistic missile was to hit Adana, a city of more than two million Turks. Such an attack would immediately draw in the Turks and oblige every NATO country to contribute to Turkey’s defence.
Adana is 140 kilometres away from the Syrian border, as the Scud missile flies. Such rockets can carry chemical weapons which the United States and others suspect have recently been used against Syrians.
To deter Syrian President Bashar Assad’s increasingly unpredictable regime from lashing out at Turkey — which now strongly opposes his dictatorship and has provided a safe haven for hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees — the Turks requested that NATO send Scud-busting Patriot missiles to protect Adana, their fourth largest city, as well as other border areas. Several Dutch Patriot batteries have been deployed since the end of January. Some batteries have been set up in a field at a joint Turkey-U.S. airbase. Others have been placed near the end of the runway at Adana’s busy civilian airport. “There is not really that much time to respond after a launch,” Col. Martin Buis, the Dutch officer responsible for defending Adana from a Syrian missile attack said during a conversation at the Adana airbase. “We’ve come to make sure that they don’t come down here.”
It was 22 years ago that I first saw Patriot missiles in action in the night skies above Riyadh and Dhahran during the first Gulf War. It was amusing at the time to see all the journalists head to the roofs of their hotels whenever the air raid sirens sounded to watch the Patriots try to intercept Saddam Hussein’s Scud missiles.
As we climbed those stairs, Saudi male guests, their children in tow, would be racing in the other direction to air raid shelters in the basement, leaving their wives alone and unprotected in their rooms out of fears for their modesty and family honour. Those first generation Patriots in Saudi Arabia provided a spectacular fireworks display whenever they destroyed a Scud by exploding near it. But the Patriots were an unproven, imperfect system at the time. More than a few Iraqi missiles, known as tactical ballistic missiles (TBMs) in military jargon, got through. Most of them fell harmlessly in the desert, but one hit a barracks housing U.S. army troops south of Dhahran at al-Khobar, killing 29 soldiers and wounding 99.
“I don’t think you will see a missile coming through here,” Buis said. “We have a small military but with the Patriots we are playing in the Premier League. It’s an improved system that’s been tested more than once. I have 100 per cent confidence in our systems.”
While the Dutch defend Adana, similar Patriot batteries operated by U.S. and German troops defend border areas further to the east. They all use software that has been modified many times since the Patriots first saw action in 1991.
The actions of the Patriots deployed by all three countries is co-ordinated at a command and control centre at the U.S.’s biggest European base in Ramstein, Germany.
When sensors pick up a launch it alerts troops down range in Turkey and declares a white, yellow or red warning. Whichever Patriot battery in Turkey is best placed to intercept launches its anti-missile missiles.
“This represents a big opportunity and a big responsibility,” said 1st Lt. Arnd de Ruiter, who commands one of the Dutch batteries. “To intercept a high velocity TBM is a great achievement.
“Within one metre of launch our response is travelling at half the speed of sound. The newest Patriot — the PAC-3 — is like a bullet hitting a bullet. It destroys the target without using any explosives. It obliterates it with kinetic energy.”
The 23-year-old de Ruiter and his three-man crew, as well as several dozen other Dutch, American and German crews, maintain a constant vigil hunched over radar scopes that peer deep inside Syria.
So they instantly know the moment something missile-related happens, whether it is in Aleppo, which is relatively near Adana and has seen a lot of fighting, or further south in Homs or Damascus.
“We have seen some longrange artillery rockets and occasionally Scuds,” Buis said. “There have been likely Scuds (landing) around Aleppo.”
As a military man, the colonel was unable to comment on the political debate that has raged for months in western capitals about whether NATO should become more involved in Syria than its entirely defensive Patriot deployment in Turkey, as the death toll in Syria rises above 70,000 and evidence mounts that Assad has used sarin gas on his own people. However, following Syria’s civil war closely from nearby, Buis was acutely aware of its deadly consequences.
“I do not have eyes on the ground in Syria to report on things but every time there is a victim, that is bad enough for me,” Buis said.
“We can see all the TBMs in Syria from their point of origin to their point of impact. When I see a Scud launch and it is a red dot on the scope, I realize that it is going to kill people. It helps us to realize what we are doing by defending the people of Adana. Protecting two million people here is motivation enough for us.”