The key fact is that the Russian plane, by Turkey’s own admission, was in Turkish airspace for precisely 17 seconds. That’s a little less time than it takes to read this paragraph aloud. The Turks shot it down anyway – and their allies publicly backed them, as loyal allies must.
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But privately, they must have been cursing Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan. They know what he’s up to. This is the first time in more than 50 years that a NATO plane has shot down a Russian plane, and it happened in very suspicious circumstances.
Even if Turkish radar data is to be believed, the two Russian SU-24s only crossed the bottom of a very narrow appendix of Turkish territory that dangles down into Syria. As Russian President Vladimir Putin said: “Our pilots, planes did not threaten Turkish territory in any way.”
According to the Russian radar data, it was the Turkish planes that crossed into Syrian territory. How strange that there was a Turkish TV crew in northern Syria, positioned just right to film the incident. (The Russian plane crashed four kilometres inside Syria.) Either way, it seems quite clear President Erdogan really wanted to shoot down a Russian aircraft, and that the Turkish pilots were under orders to do so if they could find even the slightest pretext. So why would Erdogan want to do that?
President Putin said bitterly that Erdogan and his colleagues were “accomplices of terrorists”. That’s hard to deny: Erdogan is so eager to see Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad overthrown that he left the Turkish-Syrian border open for four years so that recruits and supplies could reach the Syrian rebel groups, notably including Islamic State (IS).
Erdogan is utterly determined that Assad must go, and he doesn’t really care if Assad’s successors are Islamist extremists. But he also wants to ensure that there is no new Kurdish state on Turkey’s southern border. That is a problem for him, because that state already exists in embryo. It is called Rojava, a territory that the Syrian Kurds have carved out in the far north of the country along the Turkish border, mainly by fighting Islamic State. Indeed, the Syrian Kurds are the US-led coalition’s only effective ally on the ground against IS.
When Erdogan committed the Turkish air force to the Syrian war in July, he explained it to the United States as a decision to fight against Islamic State, but in fact Turkey has made only a token handful of strikes against IS.
Erdogan has two goals: to ensure the destruction of Assad’s regime, and to prevent the creation of a new Kurdish state in Syria. He was making some progress on both objectives – and then along came the Russians in September and saved the Syrian army from defeat, at least for the moment.
Worse yet, Putin’s strategy turns out to be quite pragmatic, and even rather attractive to the United States despite all the ritual anti-Russian propaganda emitted by Washington. Putin wants a ceasefire in Syria that will leave everybody where they are now – except Islamic State, which they can all then concentrate on destroying.
This strategy is now making some headway in the Vienna ceasefire talks, but it is utterly abhorrent to Erdogan because it would leave Assad in power in Damascus, and give the Syrian Kurds time to consolidate their new state. How can he derail this Russian-led project? Well, he could shoot down a Russian plane, and try to get a confrontation going between Russia and NATO.
