Speaking at a joint press conference with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, Russian FM Sergey Lavrov insisted that neither Russian nor Syrian military forces were in any way involved in last week’s attack which killed four Turkish soldiers in northern Syria.
Turkey had initially claimed the incident was a Syrian airstrike against Turkish forces and Turkish-backed rebels, and had promised retaliation, though even at the time there was considerable doubt over what exactly happened.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said their information suggested there was no airstrike at all, and that the attack was actually the result of an ISIS suicide bombing. ISIS announced a suicide bombing in the same area, near the town of al-Bab, that night.
Turkish officials have not made any new statements directly on the incident since the initial allegations against Syria, but that Lavrov made this comment unchallenged during a meeting with Cavusoglu strongly suggests that Turkey has accepted that the attack was not Syria’s doing.