Turkey shoots down Russian plane on Syrian border

US officials warned Turkey this week against expanding its so-called buffer zone in northeast Syria, saying such a move would complicate counter-ISIS measures, and would increase the violence that Kurds and Syrians in the region have faced since Turkey’s initial incursion in 2019.

“We strongly oppose any Turkish operation into northern Syria and have made clear our objections to Turkey,” Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East Dana Stroul said in a speech at the Middle East Institute Wednesday. “ISIS is going to take advantage of that campaign, not to mention the humanitarian impact.”

On Tuesday, Turkey shot down a Russian warplane that it says had crossed into its airspace from Syria. Though Russia denies it had violated Turkish airspace, Turkey has been complaining of such Russian violations ever since Russia began its military intervention in Syria this September.

To understand why Russia might do this and how Moscow might respond to this incident, I called Mark Galeotti, a professor at NYU’s Center for Global Affairs who focuses on Russia. He suggested that Russia could have been poking at NATO, as it has in the past, but also discussed some much deeper, and more important, issues in the Russia-Turkey relationship and Russia’s military adventure in Syria. What follows is a transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

The Turkish-backed ethnic Turkmen minority are probably the least well-known of all the groups fighting against the Assad regime in Syria. Reports that Turkmen may have killed the pilots who ejected from the Russian warplane Turkey shot down on Tuesday has put the spotlight on them, their relationship with Turkey, and their role in the Syrian civil war. To help better understand all of this, I called up Henri Barkey, the director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and an expert on Turkey. He explained how the Turks use the Turkmen as a political tool and offered his predictions about the likely reaction from the Russians.

What follows is a transcript of our discussion, lightly edited for clarity.

The downing of a Russian military plane by Turkish forces has introduced another layer of complication to the Syrian crisis and raised fears over possible escalation and the potential for a direct conflict between the US and Russia.

To get the Turkish perspective on this incident, I spoke with Steven A. Cook, the Eni Enrico Mattei senior fellow for Middle East and Africa Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, about why the Turkish military would take such dramatic action and what this could mean for the future of Turkish-Russian relations and Turkey’s policy toward Syria. What follows is a transcript of my conversation with Cook, lightly edited for length and clarity.

After Turkish forces shot down a Russian Su-24 warplane on the Turkey-Syria border on Tuesday morning, disturbing reports emerged that members of a Syrian rebel group claimed to have killed the Russian pilots as they descended with parachutes after ejecting from their destroyed plane.

“Both of the pilots were retrieved dead. Our comrades opened fire into the air and they died in the air,” Alpaslan Celik, a rebel commander, told Reuters.

Only three short hours of Turkey announcing it had shot down a Russian warplane for violating its airspace, an unusual phrase appeared as a new trending topic on Twitter: “World War 3.” The conversation is both joking and not joking.

You can see why people might worry. Turkey is a NATO ally, meaning that at least in theory the other members of NATO — the United States and most of Europe — can be obliged to come to its defense against an external attack. A theoretical slide into conflict between Turkey and Russia could thus also become a conflict between Russia and NATO, dragging the world’s top four nuclear powers into war. Tensions between NATO and Russia have been rising for two years, and now both are bombing on opposite sides in Syria. With fears of some unintended escalation in Ukraine or now Syria sparking a larger conflagration, it sounded scarily possible.

Early on Tuesday morning, Turkey shot down a Russian military plane near the Turkey-Syria border. Afterward, Russian President Vladimir Putin addressed the downing of his aircraft during a public appearance with Jordan’s King Abdullah in Sochi. Here are the comments, translated by Russia’s English-language propaganda outlet Russia Today (starts at 5:40):

Putin, clearly, is quite angry. He calls Turkey’s actions a “stab in [Russia’s] back,” and blames the country for enabling ISIS’s “barbarous, heinous ways” by allowing it to sell oil in Turkish territory. Most ominously, he threatens “serious consequences” for relations between Russia and Turkey, a NATO ally:

It is certainly possible that if this Russian plane did cross into Turkish airspace, it was an accident; Russia has been bombing some targets along the Syria-Turkey border, after all. But Russian jets have committed enough such violations that it’s also very possible this was deliberate.

Russian jets first crossed into Turkey’s airspace in early October, just a few days after Russia began bombing targets in Syria. Both the US and NATO publicly warned Russia that this was extremely dangerous: Turkey is a member of NATO, meaning that the US and European powers are at least theoretically obligated to defend it from attack.