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Turkey Shoots Down Russian Warplane Near Syrian Border Turkey Shoots Down Russian Warplane Near Syrian Border
(about 2 hours later)
ISTANBUL — Turkish fighter jets on patrol near the Syrian border on Tuesday shot down a Russian warplane that Turkey said had ignored numerous warnings and violated its airspace, in a long-feared escalation that will further strain relations between the NATO member country and Russia. MOSCOW — Two big powers supporting different factions in the Syrian civil war clashed with each other on Tuesday when Turkish fighter jets shot down a Russian warplane that Turkey said had strayed into its airspace.
NATO announced that it would hold an emergency meeting on Tuesday in Brussels to discuss the episode, as credible reports were emerging from Latakia Province, where the Russian jet went down, that rebels possibly wielding TOW antitank missiles and other weapons had hit a Russian helicopter sent to the scene of the crash to look for survivors. The tensions immediately took on Cold War overtones when Russia rejected Turkey’s claim and Ankara responded by asking for an emergency NATO meeting, eliciting more Russian anger and ridicule. After the meeting, the NATO secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, called for “calm and de-escalation” and said that the allies “stand in solidarity with Turkey.”
In his first remarks on the episode, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia confirmed that an F-16 Turkish fighter jet had shot down the Russian plane, a Sukhoi Su-24, with an air-to-air missile. But he insisted that the Russian jet had been in Syrian airspace at the time. It was thought to be the first time a NATO country has shot down a Russian plane in a half-century. And while few expect a military escalation, with neither Russia nor NATO wanting to go to war, the incident highlighted the dangers of Russian and NATO combat aircraft operating in the same theater and has soured chances for a diplomatic breakthrough over Syria.
Mr. Putin, speaking slowly and clearly angry before a meeting with King Abdullah II of Jordan in Sochi, Russia, called the incident a “stab in the back” by those who “abet” terrorism and warned that it would have “serious consequences for Russian-Turkish relations.” As President François Hollande of France met with President Obama in Washington to urge a closer and more aggressive alliance with Russia against the Islamic State, Turkey’s decision to fire on a Russian warplane attacking targets in Syria has raised tensions between Moscow and NATO and undercut efforts to persuade Russia to drop its support for President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.
Mr. Putin did not specify what those consequences might be, but hours later his foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, canceled a Wednesday visit to Turkey, and a large Russian tour operator, Natalie Tours, announced that it was suspending trips to Turkey, where Russians accounted for about 12 percent of all tourists last year. Turkey wants Mr. Assad gone, and has allowed its border with Syria to be an easy crossing point for Syrian rebels, including those the West regards as terrorists or radical Islamists; Russia wants to prop up Mr. Assad and his government. While Moscow says it is attacking the Islamic State, for the most part Russian planes and troops have been attacking the Syrian rebels, some of whom are supported by the United States and the West, who most threaten Mr. Assad’s rule.
“Russia-Turkey relations will drop below zero,” Ivan Konovalov, director of the Center for Strategic Trends Studies, said on the state-run Rossiya 24 cable news channel. The two countries are also significant trade partners. Mr. Hollande and Mr. Obama clearly hoped that the bombing of a Russian passenger jet over Egypt, claimed by the Islamic State, would cause Moscow to make defeating the jihadists more of a priority than propping up Mr. Assad. But Tuesday’s events will make that a tougher sell, for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is protective of Russia’s interests and wants to be seen as an equal player in the conflict, not beholden to Western policies.
In Washington, President Obama said Turkey had the right to defend its territory, but he urged both sides to talk to make sure they know what happened and to “discourage any kind of escalation.” At a news conference with President François Hollande of France, Mr. Obama said the episode underscored the risks of the Russian military venture in Syria. Turkey, especially under the increasingly authoritarian rule of its nationalist president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has been fierce in defending its airspace, shooting down Syrian jets that have strayed in the past. Turkey insisted that it issued 10 warnings over a five-minute period to the Russian pilot of the Sukhoi Su-24 to pull away.
“I do think that this points to an ongoing problem with the Russian operations in the sense that they are operating very close to the Turkish border and they are going after moderate opposition that are supported not only by Turkey but by a number of countries,” Mr. Obama said. But Mr. Putin, clearly angry, responded that the Russian jet had never violated Turkish airspace and was shot down over Syria. Speaking in Sochi, he called the incident a “stab in the back delivered by the accomplices of terrorists,” warning that it would have “serious consequences for Russian-Turkish relations.”
The episode occurred as Russia and the West were slowly edging toward some manner of understanding to unite forces to confront the Islamic State in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris and the downing of a Russian charter flight over Egypt that killed a total of 354 people. Mr. Putin said that instead of “immediately making the necessary contact with us, the Turkish side turned to their partners in NATO for talks on this incident. It’s as if we shot down the Turkish plane and not they, ours. Do they want to put NATO at the service of Islamic State?”
Mr. Hollande was in Washington to begin a world tour to try to build consensus on the issue. But Tuesday’s events seem likely to undercut efforts to convince Mr. Putin to shift his strategy from building up Turkey’s enemy, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, to fighting the Islamic State, which he today accused Turkey of quietly supporting. A United States military spokesman, Col. Steven Warren, confirmed on Tuesday that Turkish pilots had warned the Russian pilot 10 times, but that the Russian jet ignored the warnings. Colonel Warren, speaking from Baghdad to reporters in Washington, also said American officials were analyzing radar track data to determine the precise location of the Russian jet when it was shot down.
The warplane episode also underscores the uneasy relations between Turkey and other members of the NATO alliance, who fear being dragged into a larger conflict through an impetuous act by the Turkish leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. At an emergency NATO meeting on Tuesday, Turkish official played recordings of the warnings Turkish F-16 pilots had issued to the Russian aircraft. The Russian pilots did not reply.
So cautious are the NATO countries about Article 5 of the NATO Treaty, which calls for mutual defense, that when Mr. Hollande declared war on the Islamic State after the Paris attacks, he invoked the Lisbon Treaty and sidestepped NATO. The Turkish account of the episode was described by several diplomats, who asked not to be identified because they were discussing a closed-door session at the alliance’s headquarters in Brussels.
Russia’s entry into the heavily trafficked skies around Syria in September had raised immediate concerns about encounters, inadvertent or otherwise, that could lead to confrontations involving Turkey and the United States. Turkey has warned Russia about intrusions in its airspace at least two times since it began its bombing campaign in September, and last month it shot down an unmanned aerial device that analysts said was likely of Russian origin. The Russian SU-24 plane was over the Hatay region of Turkey for about 17 seconds when it was struck, according to one diplomat who attended the NATO meeting. But the SU-24 re-entered Syrian airspace after being hit and therefore crashed in Syria, the diplomat said.
On Tuesday, television footage shown on the privately owned Turkish channel Haberturk showed a warplane exploding in the air and tumbling down in flames in a wooded area, identified by the broadcaster as a region of northern Syria known to Turks as the Turkmen Mountains. Tensions between Russia and Turkey had increased lately over Russian bombing of Turkmen tribesmen in northern Syria, whom Turkey regards as under its protection and who are fighting to oust Mr. Assad. Just this week, Turkey summoned the Russian ambassador in Ankara to demand that Moscow stop targeting Turkmen tribesmen in Syria.
The Russian military said that the plane’s two pilots had ejected, and another video published by Anadolu Agency, a semiofficial news agency, showed two figures parachuting from the aircraft. Video footage emerged soon after showing one bloody pilot on the ground surrounded by Syrians exulting at his death. “It was stressed that the Russian side’s actions were not a fight against terror, but they bombed civilian Turkmen villages and this could lead to serious consequences,” the Turkish Foreign Ministry said.
Shadi al-Ouwayni, an activist in rural Latakia Province, where the pilot’s body was recovered, said one pilot was shot as he drifted to the ground in his parachute while the other was captured by a local militia called the 10th Brigade. He said the pilots landed in different rebel-controlled locations. His account could not be independently verified. And so it has. The diplomatic spat may have led directly to Moscow continuing to target the Turkmen on Tuesday, and Turkey’s aggressive response.
“One of the Russian pilots was shot as he was trying to land,” he said. “The other was injured and captured.” What may make matters worse is that those same tribesmen say that they shot and killed both Russian pilots as they floated to earth in their parachutes, having apparently ejected safely from their plane, which was brought down by a Turkish F-16 firing air-to-air missiles. And then the tribesmen reportedly destroyed a Russian helicopter with a TOW antitank missile as it tried to rescue the airmen.
A tape of one bloodied pilot lying on the ground began circulating on the Internet, with an activist saying that, “This is a Russian pilot and killer of men, women and children who was killed today after his plane was shot down in Syria.” The Russian Ministry of Defense confirmed late Tuesday that one fighter pilot had been killed by ground fire and that a marine deployed on the search-and-rescue helicopter died but that the rest of the crew had managed to escape.
Despite those reports, a Turkish official said late Wednesday that both pilots were alive and in the hands of opposition groups. NATO countries have been concerned about Mr. Erdogan’s increasingly authoritarian tendencies for some time, and NATO officials acknowledge that Turkey’s agenda in Syria does not always match that of Washington, Britain or France — let alone Russia.
Soon after the pilots landed and the helicopter was shot down, Russian bombers from the air base outside Latakia began pummeling the area, the activist said. And while he has recently allowed American planes to use Incirlik air base for sorties into Syria, Mr. Erdogan’s own troops have largely turned their fire on the Syrian Kurds, whom Washington regards as its best local ally so far against the Islamic State.
Tensions had been building recently over Russian bombing in the area along the border. Last week, Turkey summoned the Russian ambassador, Andrey G. Karlov, to discuss Ankara’s concerns over the bombing of Turkmen villages in northern Syria and called for an immediate end to the Russian military operation close to the Turkish border, according to a Turkish Foreign Ministry statement. Turkey has been in a struggle for decades with Kurdish separatists in Turkey, labeling them terrorists, and regards the Kurds in Syria and Iraq as sharing the same desire to break away and form a Kurdish state.
“It was stressed that the Russian side’s actions were not a fight against terror, but they bombed civilian Turkmen villages and this could lead to serious consequences,” the statement said. In a speech on Tuesday, Mr. Erdogan said there would have been more incidents like Tuesday’s if Turkey had not exercised such restraint.
Ankara has long called for the protection of Turkmens, who are of Turkish descent, in Syria. “The reason why worse incidents have not taken place in the past regarding Syria is the coolheadedness of Turkey,” he said in speech in Ankara. “Nobody should doubt that we made our best efforts to avoid this latest incident. But everyone should respect the right of Turkey to defend its borders.”
The downing of the jet on Tuesday was the first time that anything negative had dominated Russian news coverage of the military campaign, although the fate of the pilots was not discussed. While Mr. Hollande is pressing Mr. Obama for tougher action against the Islamic State and plans to travel to Moscow on Thursday to meet Mr. Putin, Washington-Moscow tensions, high over Russia’s annexation of Crimea, were highlighted again on Tuesday when Mr. Obama complained that Russian airstrikes against moderate opposition groups in Syria were bolstering the Assad government instead of trying to destroy the Islamic State.
Coverage in the state-controlled news media has been heavily sanitized, consisting mostly of cockpit videos of bombs striking targets or of generals talking in briefing rooms. The first publicly acknowledged casualty, the death of a young soldier last month, was quickly dismissed officially as a suicide. Russian officials vehemently deny that their bombing campaign has killed any civilians in Syria. But the United States and Russia have different interests in Syria, and Mr. Putin has been clear about the need to preserve the existing Syrian government, if not Mr. Assad himself as leader. Mr. Obama, like Mr. Hollande, is committed to the ouster of Mr. Assad and believes that the Syrian strongman is complicit with the Islamic State — from which his government buys considerable amounts of oil — as a means of dividing his own opposition.
The Kremlin is highly sensitive to comparisons with the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan 35 years ago, which slowly soured much of the public on foreign intervention, despite Soviet censorship. In a news conference in Washington with Mr. Hollande, Mr. Obama said: “I do think that this points to an ongoing problem with the Russian operations in the sense that they are operating very close to the Turkish border and they are going after moderate opposition that are supported not only by Turkey but by a number of countries.”
In Ankara, Mr. Davutoglu made a brief comment likely to further alienate Russia, telling reporters, “Everyone must know that it is our international right and national duty to take any measure against whoever violates our air or land borders.” Turkey has the right to defend its territory, Mr. Obama said, but he urged both sides to talk to make sure they figure out what happened and “discourage any kind of escalation.”
Russia’s retaliation so far has been largely symbolic. Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov canceled a Wednesday visit to Turkey, and a large Russian tour operator, Natalie Tours, announced it was suspending sales to Turkey. Russians accounted for 12 percent of all tourists to Turkey last year.
The two countries are also significant trade partners. But “Russia-Turkey relations will drop below zero,” Ivan Konovalov, director of the Center for Strategic Trends Studies, said on the state-run Rossiya 24 cable news channel.
Washington is not interested in getting deeper into Syria with ground troops or having a conflict with Russia. So cautious are the NATO countries about Article 5 of the NATO Treaty, which calls for mutual self-defense, that when Mr. Hollande declared “war” on the Islamic State after the Paris attacks, he invoked the European Union’s toothless Lisbon Treaty and sidestepped NATO. Mr. Hollande was also, French officials have said, eager not to offend Mr. Putin by making Syria a NATO issue.