[M_B_S]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 46206.html

Turkey shoots down 'Russian jet' near Syrian border and video shows plane coming down
Turkey says the plane violated its airspace
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Shit happens .....

But the two pilots are not dead thats the good news.

M_B_S

[davep]

This is pretty serious. Let's hope it doesn't escalate.

[davep]

"Turkey's president says the Russian jet ignored repeated requests to move away from the Turkish border before it was shot down."

Away from? Turkey appears to be trying to escalate this. Not clever.

[SeaGypsy]

Erdogan is one of the key hypocritical monsters in the IS game. Maybe Putin will be serving him breakfast tomorrow.

[davep]

So what happens when NATO member Turkey downs one of NATO member France's planes?

[M_B_S]

Russia says the plane was shot down in Syrias Airspace if true this is an act of war against Russia because Turkey is violating Syrias airspace and Russia was invited by Syrias Tyrant Assad so acting in conformation with international law.

We will see the NATO vs. RUS radar proof soon.

M_B_S

[davep]

We will see the NATO vs. RUS radar proof soon.

Blimey! I agree.

[SeaGypsy]

Bringing Turkey into the EU at all, NATO particularly, was always going to end badly. If both have to cut loose to appease Russia while it does a proper job on IS, yeah, Erdogan is both evil & an idiot & the whole thing stinks to high hell.

[Cog]

Looks like we have video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMznJBUsD0E

[davep]

It appears to be an attempt to scupper Hollande's plans for a broad coalition against ISIS.

[Subjectivist]

Russia and France have been friendly far far longer than France and Turkey. France basically took Syria from Turkey in 1918 and that resentment still poisons their relationship.

[Cid_Yama]

It was the first time a NATO member's armed forces have downed a Russian or Soviet military aircraft since the 1950s and Russian and Turkish assets fell on fears of an escalation between the former Cold War enemies.

"The data we have is very clear. There were two planes approaching our border, we warned them as they were getting too close," a senior Turkish official told Reuters.

One of the pilots was in the hands of Turkmen forces in Syria who were looking for the other one, broadcaster CNN Turk reported, citing local sources. Russian military helicopters were also searching for the pilots, Turkey's Dogan news agency reported. The plane went down in area known by Turks as "Turkmen Mountain", it said.

Ankara has traditionally expressed solidarity with Syrian Turkmens, who are Syrians of Turkish descent.

About 1,700 people have fled the mountainous Syrian area near to the Turkish border as a result of fighting in the last three days, a Turkish official said on Monday. Russian jets have bombed the area in support of ground operations by Syrian government forces.

link

So the plane, which had been bombing targets in the Turkmen Mountains which are in Syria, an area inhabited by Syrian Turkmens, who are Syrians of Turkish descent, crashed in the Syrian Turkmen Mountains, and one of the pilots has been captured by Syrian Turkmen in Syria.

Doesn't sound like they were in Turkish airspace, and it sounds intentional, in support of the Syrian Turkmens, who were being bombed by those planes. Who have now captured one pilot, and are looking to capture the other one.

[Cid_Yama]

No-one quite knows where Turkey stands in relation to the brutal and bloodthirsty Islamic State (IS), but there are reasons for fearing the worst. The worst, from the point of view of the West generally, as well as much of the Middle East, is that Turkey’s antagonism towards Syria’s President Bashar Assad outweighs any opposition it may have to IS, and that its current foreign strategy is postulated on that premise. Underlying this position is the long-standing aim of Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to deny Kurdish aspirations for full independence, and crush the militant Kurdish organization, the PKK - a stance which has the full support of Ankara’s political establishment. As demonstrated last autumn in the fight for Kobane, the town on the Syrian-Turkish border, rather than have the Kurds prevail the Turks would have preferred to see it overrun by IS. In the event, due to determined efforts by the US-led anti-IS alliance, Kobane has not fallen, but the Turks have sat on their hands while the battle raged. The Western powers can see perfectly well what game Turkey is playing – standing by while IS slogs it out with its traditional Kurdish enemies, and using the humanitarian disaster thus created to pressure the US into helping remove Assad and his Shia-supported Islamic government. In pursuit of replacing the Assad regime with one in the Sunni tradition, many fear that the Turks are actually supporting IS fighters with arms and training, as well as facilitating the flow of foreign fighters across its borders to join IS – something that Turkey strongly denies.

link

Turkey is 99.8 % Moslem, 90% of which are Sunni. So who's side do you think they are on? I mean really.

I believe both Turkey and Saudi Arabia secretly hold a desire for an IS controlled Syria and Iraq.

[ennui2]

This is turning into a chaotic free-for-all with too many actors in Syria and too many criss-crossing alliances and disputes. It definitely does remind me of the factors leading up to WWI in which the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in a backwater tipped over a bunch of dominoes.

[Cog]

Since I don't like Russians or Turks, I'm a bit conflicted on who to root for in the coming crap-fest.

[Cid_Yama]

Actually Serbia was not the backwater you might think.

In 1888, the Oriental Railway from Austria, across the Balkans via Belgrade, Sofia, to Constantinople, was opened. This linked with the railways of Austria-Hungary and other European countries and put the Ottoman capital in direct communication with Vienna, Paris, and Berlin. It was to be significant for later events.

The Sultan, Abdul Hamid II, on November 27, 1899, awarded Deutsche Bank, headed by Georg von Siemens, a concession for a railway from Konia to Baghdad and to the Persian Gulf. In 1888 and again in 1893, the Sultan had assured the Anatolian Railway Company that it should have priority in the construction of any railway to Baghdad. On the strength of that assurance, the Anatolian Company had conducted expensive surveys of the proposed line. As part of the railway concession, the shrewd negotiators of the Deutsche Bank, led by Karl Helfferich, negotiated subsurface mineral rights twenty kilometers to either side of the proposed Baghdad Railway line.[22] Deutsche Bank and the German government backing them made certain that included the sole rights to any petroleum which might be found. The Germans had scored a strategic coup over the British, or so it seemed. Mesopotamian oil secured through completion of the Berlin-Baghdad Railway was to be Germany’s secure source to enter the emerging era of oil-driven transport.

A German-built rail link to Baghdad and on to the Persian Gulf, capable of carrying military troops and munitions, was a strategic threat to the British oil resources of Persia. Persian oil was the first crucial source of secure British petroleum for the Navy.

Turkey, backed and trained by Germany, had the potential, should it get the financial and military means, to launch a military attack on what had become vital British interests in Suez, the Persian route to India, the Dardanelles. By 1903 the German Reich was prepared to give the Sultan that means in the form of the Baghdad Railway and German investment in Ottoman Anatolia.

By 1913 that German engagement had taken on an added dimension with a German-Turkish Military Agreement under which German General Liman von Sanders, member of the German Supreme War Council, with personal approval of the Kaiser, was sent to Constantinople to reorganize the Turkish army on the lines of the legendary German General Staff. In a letter to Chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg, dated April 26, 1913, Freiherr von Wangenheim, the German Ambassador to Constantinople declared, “The Power which controls the Army will always be the strongest one in Turkey. No Government hostile to Germany will be able to hold on to power if the Army is controlled by us…” [25].

As well in Serbia British military and intelligence networks were most active prior to outbreak of war. Major R.G.D. Laffan was in charge of a British military training mission in Serbia just before the war. Following the war, Laffan wrote of the British role in throwing a huge block on the route of the German-Baghdad project:

"If 'Berlin-Baghdad' were achieved, a huge block of territory producing every kind of economic wealth, and unassailable by sea-power would be united under German authority," warned R.G.D. Laffan. Laffan was at that time a senior British military adviser attached to the Serbian Army.

"Russia would be cut off by this barrier from her western friends, Great Britain and France," Laffan added. "German and Turkish armies would be within easy striking distance of our Egyptian interests, and from the Persian Gulf, our Indian Empire would be threatened. The port of Alexandretta and the control of the Dardanelles would soon give Germany enormous naval power in the Mediterranean."

Laffan suggested a British strategy to sabotage the Berlin-Baghdad link. "A glance at the map of the world will show how the chain of States stretched from Berlin to Baghdad. The German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Bulgaria, Turkey. One little strip of territory alone blocked the way and prevented the two ends of the chain from being linked together. That little strip was Serbia. Serbia stood small but defiant between Germany and the great ports of Constantinople and Salonika, holding the Gate of the East...Serbia was really the first line of defense of our eastern possessions. If she were crushed or enticed into the 'Berlin-Baghdad' system, then our vast but slightly defended empire would soon have felt the shock of Germany's eastward thrust."

British intelligence thus instigated the assasination Of Austro-Hungarian heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand by the Serbian Black Hand in the hopes that it would incite Austria-Hungary to attack Serbia and break the rail link between Berlin and the Middle East.

link

"If 'Berlin-Baghdad' were achieved, a huge block of territory producing every kind of economic wealth, and unassailable by sea-power would be united under German authority," warned R.G.D. Laffan.

[EdwinSm]

We will have to wait and see how this develops, and where the two planes actually were. Maps show an area very close to the border


I have no way of judging where the plane was flying before it was hit, but I do know that Russian planes are frequently sent to violate other country's airspace so there is some credibility with the Turkish claim.

[shortonoil]

"but I do know that Russian planes are frequently sent to violate other country's airspace so there is some credibility with the Turkish claim."

Now exactly, "how" do you know that?

[Cog]

Because that is what Russians do. They also shoot down civilian airliners although they deny it.

[GHung]

What's with all the plus signs? Trying to get the rest of us to be alarmists? Freaks love company I guess.