A Syrian Army cargo plane carrying supplies to the Abu al-Dohur military airport crashed this weekend, killing at least 35 soldiers. It’s the latest in a growing number of planes lost in the civil war.
But how the plane crash happened is a matter of considerable dispute, with the army insisting it was just a “weather-related” crash because heavy fog, and al-Qaeda’s Jabhat al-Nusra claiming they’d shot it down.
That the crash happened during an attempted landing at the airport lends credence to the theory that it was simply bad weather, but there’s no way to confirm what happened either way.
Nusra, along with other Islamist rebel factions like ISIS, have gotten a fair number of the US anti-aircraft missiles provided by Saudi Arabia, and while the effectiveness of those missiles is sometimes in doubt, there is a serious risk that such missiles will be used against the US-led coalition, which is conducting airstrikes against those rebel factions now.