US troops and Patriot missile batteries will be deployed to southern Turkey, along the border with Syria, in a move US officials claim is aimed at defending against a possible Syrian attack on its much larger and vastly more powerful neighbor.
Of course there is no reason to believe Syria is considering an attack on Turkey in the first place, and indeed much of northern Syria is already in the hands of Turkish and NATO-backed rebel factions, making such a strike even less plausible.
The deployment is said to include two missile batteries and 400 US troops. This is not the only US deployment on the Syrian border, however, as additional US troops were sent to the Jordanian border to prepare a possible invasion of Syria.
Turkey has been seeking deployments of Patriot missiles for quite some time, and while they could be used to impose a no-fly zone in the region, NATO officials insist that this isn’t going to be the case, and that the deployment is rather meant to defend Turkey from a non-existent missile threat.
