ISIS/ISIL conflict in Syria/Iraq (No OpEd, No Politics)

P

PanAsian

Major
Haven't been able to catch up on all related posts and the fast developing stories but is there the possibility that this was not premeditated action on Turkey's part at the national level? Which if so may actually indicate a more dangerous situation.

Whatever the truth is behind the shootdown it is obvious Russia is not phased. The question remains though that despite a sound and at least superficially growing international effort to at least contain IS, could they and would their sponsors allow them to be contained or defeated in the longer term?

I think the answer is a clear no as the local forces see their fight as only victory or defeat while intervening forces external to the Middle East prefer a low cost to them stalemate or near-stalemate war of attrition. Disappointingly I think only combat fatigue by the populations involved and realizing the futility of combat compared to development over time will lead to peace as it is not beneficial enough a task for anyone to try to impose a regional peace while the locals still want to fight it out.
 
B

B.I.B.

Captain
plawolf said:
Its quite amusing that everyone is taking Turkey's version of events as fact when the Russians are openly insisting their plane never entered Turkish airspace at all.
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To be fair , the Russians have a long history of misrepresenting events.
Anyway I wonder if the Russians have the resources to be actively involved if this conflict was to drag on for years.
 
SamuraiBlue

SamuraiBlue

Captain
plawolf said:
Did you listen to the same audio tapes as me?! Because on the version of the tapes the BBC posted, the audio quality was astonishingly poor, with a hell of a lot of static, interference and heavy accented English.

I am a fluent native speaker of English, and I could barely pick out even an handful of words from it, certainly not enough to even get a general idea of what the message is trying to say, and I was concerntrating and listening hard. So i would be amazed if the Russian pilots understood any of it at all.

Considering the Turkish version of the tapes should have been the clean recorded version before transmission, I cannot understand how the audio quality could be so atrocious.

A cynical person might think the Turks deliverably garbled up their 'warnings' to make them unintelligible to the Russians so they could claim they gave fair warning to lend their ambush the cover of reasonableness while not tipping the Russians off so they could ensure they could shoot the jet down.
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If you are talking about the recording that was made by the US then it's because they were listening in/recording in Baghdad.
Transponders on airplanes are not strong enough at those distances.
 
Blackstone

Blackstone

Brigadier
plawolf said:
Did you listen to the same audio tapes as me?! Because on the version of the tapes the BBC posted, the audio quality was astonishingly poor, with a hell of a lot of static, interference and heavy accented English.

I am a fluent native speaker of English, and I could barely pick out even an handful of words from it, certainly not enough to even get a general idea of what the message is trying to say, and I was concerntrating and listening hard. So i would be amazed if the Russian pilots understood any of it at all.

Considering the Turkish version of the tapes should have been the clean recorded version before transmission, I cannot understand how the audio quality could be so atrocious.

A cynical person might think the Turks deliverably garbled up their 'warnings' to make them unintelligible to the Russians so they could claim they gave fair warning to lend their ambush the cover of reasonableness while not tipping the Russians off so they could ensure they could shoot the jet down.
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I heard the supposed audio listed below, and heard some pointed warnings. Also, the serious tone of the Turkish pilots made it clear they meant business. Did the minor violation justified shooting down of Russian aircraft? Not in my mind. As stated earlier, I think Turkish leaders didn't want Russia to attack their allies in Syria, and planned an ambush to either stop Russia outright, and failing that to ensnare NATO in a fight not of its choosing.

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Brumby

Brumby

Major
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Assessment of the situation by Lt. Gen. Tom McInerney (ex Norad commander). His opinion best sum up as "Turkey Shooting Down Russian Plane Was a 'Very Bad Mistake'".

Lt. Gen. Tom McInerney said on "Real Story" that a radar tracking map shows the plane crossing the very tip of Turkey, which he estimated lasted for 20-40 seconds, and on a trajectory back toward Syria.
McInerney said that while he was a NORAD commander in Alaska they would never have done anything like this.

"This airplane was not making any maneuvers to attack the territory," McInerney said. "It was probably pressing the limits, that's fair. But you don't shoot 'em down just because of that."

Turkey maintains that it issued 10 warnings in a five-minute span to the Russian aircraft.
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Watch the full analysis in the video link.
 
janjak desalin

janjak desalin

Junior Member
Yesterday at 9:04 AM
janjak desalin said:
[...]Expect Turkey's genocide of the Armenian people to become a major international issue, soon!
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Russia is already exacting its revenge on Turkey for downing a Russian warplane​
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by:
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"Just over 24 hours after Turkey
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after claiming the jet had violated Turkish airspace, Moscow is already exacting its revenge — albeit subtly.

"We're not going to wage a war against Turkey. ... But we will seriously reconsider our agreements with the Turkish government," Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in a press call on Wednesday, according to The
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.

"Our attitude to the Turkish people hasn't changed," Lavrov continued. "We only have questions about the Turkish leadership."

Turkey defended its decision to down the plane on Tuesday,
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was in Turkish airspace and had been warned repeatedly before it was shot down by Turkish F-16 jets. But Russian President Vladimir Putin said the plane was destroyed by a Turkish missile while flying in Syrian airspace, roughly a mile from the Turkish border.

By Wednesday morning, Russia had
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rebels — including Turkmen insurgents, who have ethnic ties to Turkey — in Syria's Latakia province, ignoring
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over the past week to end its military operations close to the Turkish border.

Russia also announced Wednesday that it would deploy state-of-the-art S-400 missile systems to the Russian Hemeimeem air base near Latakia, Syria — 30 miles south of the Turkish border, the AP
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. The missiles, which are able to hit a plane with extreme accuracy, are evidently meant to deter Turkish jets from shooting down Russian planes in the future.

Additionally, Russia issued
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advising its citizens against visiting Turkey. And Russian travel agencies announced on Wednesday that they will withdraw their business in Turkey until next year,
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by Boris Zilberman, a Russia expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

Russian tourists account for a huge portion of Turkey's tourism industry — 3.3 million Russian tourists visited Turkey in 2014, the second-largest number of tourist arrivals after Germany and around 12% of total visitors, according to
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.
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And in a largely symbolic gesture on Wednesday, the Russian parliament
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for anyone who denies that the mass killings of Armenians that began under Ottoman rule in 1915 constituted a "genocide," according to an article translated by Foreign Policy columnist and Russia commentator Julia Ioffe.

Use of the word remains a charged issue in Turkey, which staunchly objects to such a characterization. Eastern Armenia remained part of the Russian Empire until its collapse in 1917.
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And there is one other way that Russia could retaliate against Turkey more directly: Namely, by drawing attention to the NATO ally's suspected ties to the Islamic State in Syria.

'Accomplices of terrorists'

As
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noted on Wednesday in its daily briefing, Russia "is likely to use intelligence and disinformation to highlight
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with the Islamic State."

Western officials have long harbored suspicions about Turkey's links to the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, ISIL, or Daesh. One official told The Guardian's Martin Chulov in July that a US-led raid on the compound housing ISIS' "chief financial officer" produced
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that Turkish officials directly dealt with ranking ISIS members — namely, by purchasing oil from them.

Separately,
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,
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, and
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have suggested in the past that Turkey has helped enable ISIS by turning a blind eye to the vast smuggling networks of weapons and fighters during the ongoing Syrian war.

For his part, Biden charged that countries like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates were so focused on ousting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad that they did not properly vet the opposition groups to which they sent money and weapons. (He later apologized.)

Turkey joined the US-led anti-ISIS coalition in late July, after a suicide bomber with links to the terrorist group killed 32 activists in the southeastern border town of Suruc. Still, lingering suspicions remained about Turkey's commitment to fighting ISIS, as it embarked on a dual campaign to wipe out a Kurdish insurgency in its southeast.

Those suspicions were all but put to rest last month when an ISIS-linked suicide bomber killed more than 150 people at a peace rally in Ankara — the deadliest terror attack in Turkey's recent history.

But one day after Turkey downed its warplane, Russia has already begun to bring Turkey's murky history with the group back into focus in order to discredit Ankara's role in the anti-ISIS coalition — and legitimize its own.

"Turkey has demonstrated that it is protecting ISIS," Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said Wednesday
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, adding that the damage from "Turkey's criminal actions ... will be hard to repair."

Medvedev was seemingly echoing a statement made by Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday, when he referred to Turkey as "
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of terrorists."

"We established a long time ago that large quantities of oil and oil products from territory captured by the Islamic State have been arriving on Turkish territory," Putin said from the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi before a meeting with Jordan's King Abdullah.

Lavrov added on Wednesday morning that "terrorists" have been using Turkish territory to plot attacks on other countries, the AP
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. He claimed that the Russian warplane shot down by Turkey had been targeting the extremists' oil infrastructure in Syria.

In any case, this war of words may be as far as Russia is willing to go — for now.

"Putin's initial reaction — calling the incident '
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by the terrorists' accomplices' — is about as bellicose as could be imagined. But Putin is no stranger to harsh rhetoric, and he has broader interests to play for," geopolitical expert Ian Bremmer, president of Eurasia Group, told Business Insider on Tuesday.

Bremmer noted, however, that the "huge egos" of Turkish President Erdogan and Putin certainly won't help future efforts to mend Turkish-Russian relations.

The Soufan Group largely agreed.

"The most unfortunate consequence will be that Russia will now roll back from its apparent willingness to consider solutions for Syria that do not depend on Assad remaining in power," the group said. "This is a key demand for Turkey, and in
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, neither will want to appear to have blinked first."
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Just the beginning! Erase my prescient posts, but you can't erase history!
 
Last edited:
solarz

solarz

Brigadier
plawolf said:
It is my understanding that the Syrian-Turkish boarder region is in dispute, with overlapping territorial claims. So the area in question may be Turkish on Turkish maps, but I bet on Syrian maps (which the Russians would have been using) it says that's sovereign Syrian territory.
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Bingo! I suspect this is exactly the case once we cut through the usual media BS. That area in question is simply disputed territory, and the Turkish air force chose to fire upon a Russian jet flying over the disputed area.

This would be analogous to the PLAN sinking a Philippines ship in the SCS, or the Japanese opening fire on Chinese ships or planes in the Diaoyu Island area.
 
cn_habs

cn_habs

Junior Member
Brumby said:
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Assessment of the situation by Lt. Gen. Tom McInerney (ex Norad commander). His opinion best sum up as "Turkey Shooting Down Russian Plane Was a 'Very Bad Mistake'".


Watch the full analysis in the video link.
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The general went as far as calling the Turkish action "planned provocation" which is the most logical conclusion IMHO. Warning the Russians while they were in Syrian territory doesn't warrant an AA missile and it's extremely unlikely 10 edible verbal warnings can be given within a timespan of 15 secs.
 
janjak desalin

janjak desalin

Junior Member
cn_habs said:
The general went as far as calling the Turkish action "planned provocation" which is the most logical conclusion IMHO. Warning the Russians while they were in Syrian territory doesn't warrant an AA missile and it's extremely unlikely 10 edible verbal warnings can be given within a timespan of 15 secs.
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For those that might not have been aware, or don't remember, Mehmet Ali Ağca, who attempted to assassinate Pope John Paul II was a member of the Grey Wolves.
 
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