Russia has announced on Friday that they are sending a pair of warships armed with cruise missiles to the Syrian coast, after recent fighting with Turkish troops.
Over 30 Turkish troops were killed in Idlib Province, and Russia says that they hold Turkey responsible for their own casualties. They said Turkey was not disclosing the location of their troops, and also were embedded with Islamist rebels, making themselves a target.
Turkey has denied this, saying they weren’t with the rebels, and that they’d told Russia where their troops were when they got killed. The Turkish forces are threatening more attacks on Syria going forward.
They have sent thousands of troops into Idlib in recent weeks, and as they escalate the attacks, there is more risk of them running headlong into the Russian military. While Turkey seems confident it can bowl over Syria’s war-weary military, it seems a stretch to think they can fight Russia at the same time.
The Sultan has been summoned to Moscow where he will have his head handed to him by President Vladimir Putin.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6AqE_yT1XuM
Hopefully.
Turkey can field enough troops, armor and artillery to be a serious problem. Their air force is old, but they have a couple hundred jets that could tie up Russian and Syrian air assets, even with the availability of Russian and Syrian air defenses. That would reduce Russian and Syrian ability to attack Turkish ground troops.
However, Russia can of course reinforce its in-theater assets as well as using stand-off weapons from Russian territory itself. So Turkey will absorb serious losses if it escalates to the point where Turkey is actively attacking Russian assets.
The worst situation for Turkey would be for Syrian and Iranian forces to start conducting guerrilla attacks on Turkish forces.
The worst situation for Russia and Syria will be if the US neocons use Turkey as a stalking horse to get NATO involved – which in the end means the US. While the Pentagon is probably not interested in that, due to the risk of WWIII, it is virtually certain that the neocons and probably Trump himself are up for attacking Syria.
This is in essence the US neocons and Israel’s last chance to take out Syria before the upcoming Iran war – if they’re willing to risk direct confrontation with Russia.
Trump probably doesn’t want a messy war on his re-election campaign.
Yes But will they fight or RUN
Looks like Russia took a little revenge over Turkey shooting down their SU-24 back in 2015.
So far, Erdogan has extracted no hard commitments from the U.S. or NATO.
He can hardly go hot in Syria alone. The Turkish army would be operating essentially without air support while battling local Russian air and missile power at all levels.
“….They said Turkey was not disclosing the location of their troops, and also were embedded with Islamist rebels…”
true enough
I am sure that the Turks have gotten the message that Russia is sending by dispatching those warships to the Eastern Med.
If Turkey escalates any more, they and their jihadist friends will be bombed heavily in Idlib