Turkey shoots down Russian warplane

Dale, the Russians invented the ground attack aircraft with the Ilyushin IL-2 Shturmovik

From George Abert, Formerly Of Air Force Intelligence

Why did Turkey shoot down a Russian Air Force jet?

Turkey is so militarily inferior to Russia that it is unlikely Turkey would commit an act of war against Russia without encouragement from Washington. We might think that Turkey would feel shielded by NATO, but it is doubtful that many European members of NATO would risk nuclear annihiliation by going to war with Russia in order to save Turkey from the consequences of such a reckless and irresponsible act as shooting down a Russian military aircraft and lying about it. Turkey has issued no apology and no believable explanation. Unless Erdogan has lost his mind, Washington is behind the shootdown, and the reason is Washington’s desperation to decode the new Russian technology that gives Russian forces total control over a battlefield, whether on land, sea, or air.

When the Russians deployed their forces to Syria they also deployed some new stealth technology. So far as I know they’ve only used this technology in Syria twice, once during their first sortie and one other time when some Israeli Air Force jets entered what they knew was Russian operational airspace.

As noted, the first use of this stealth technology was during the first Russian sortie. In accordance with protocols agreed to beforehand with Israel and the US, the Russians informed the US of their intent to launch a sortie. They did so an hour prior to the launch. When they did they also employed a new stealth technology. The technology effectively blinded both the US and Israel. None of the radars worked and most, if not all, satellite coverage was lost or compromised as well. But there’s more.

About a week after Putin’s UN General Assembly address the Israelis launched a sortie into Syria which flew into airspace that was under Russian operational control. Russian air controllers warned the Israelis that they had violated Russian controlled airspace. When the Israelis ignored the Russian air controllers, the stealth technology was employed a second time. The Israeli aircraft are equipped with two radars, one for fire acquisition and the other for fire control. Both are advanced and employ frequency-skipping technology to avoid being jammed. Both radars were effectively jammed. These aircraft have multiple telemetry data-links to their base. These were shut down. The only communications channel left was the high-frequency AM band normally used by civilian air traffic controllers. After the stealth technology was turned on and it was clear to the Russians that the Israelis knew they had been shut down, the Russian air traffic controllers used this AM band to tell the Israelis to scram. The Israelis complied.

Whatever this technology is, it’s a game changer and I’m certain that breaking this technology has been given an extremely high priority.

So why did Turkey shoot down the Russian jet?

I suspect somebody wants the Russians to start using this stealth technology more often, often enough for its weaknesses to be exposed. Shooting down that Russian jet might just get the Russians motivated to do that.

If I’m correct I bet every Raven and ELINT specialist in the business has been deployed to that theater of operations to hack this one! One can only imagine how many resources are being amassed.

A brief report by Reuters has completely shattered Ankara's story of the Russian jet joyriding in its airspace:

The United States believes that the Russian jet shot down by Turkey on Tuesday was hit inside Syrian airspace after a brief incursion into Turkish airspace, a U.S. official told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The official said that assessment was based on detection of the heat signature of the jet.
Even if we assume that the Russian jet briefly entered Turkish airspace, it would be a clear violation of international law for Turkish fighter jets to attack the plane inside Syria.

What's puzzling is that it's highly unlikely that Turkey acted without consent from the United States. Is Washington having second thoughts about this clear provocation?

It's interesting that Obama has expressed support for Turkey, without explicitly stating that Russia violated Turkish airspace:

Russia just got out maneuvered.

What's puzzling is that it's highly unlikely that Turkey acted without consent from the United States.

Turkey’s Actions Show Desperation and Despair of Regime Change Camp

By Dan Glazebrook

November 26, 2015 "Information Clearing House" - "RT" - Turkey’s shooting down of a Russian jet shows the utter desperation currently sweeping through the regime change camp as Russia closes in on the death squads in Syria.

At 9:30am, a Russian SU-24 jet was shot down by a Turkish fighter plane. The pilots were then allegedly killed by Syrian Turkmen anti-government militias, with the body of one being paraded on camera in a video that was immediately posted to YouTube. Turkey claimed the jet had encroached on Turkish airspace, but Russia maintains the plane was shot down inside Syrian territory, 4km from the Turkish border. Rather than calling Russia to defuse any tension arising from the attack, Turkey then immediately called an emergency NATO meeting to ramp it up – “as if we shot down their plane,” Putin commented, “and not they ours”.
To make sense of this apparently senseless provocation, it is necessary to cut through the multiple layers of obfuscation which surround Western narratives around Syria and Islamic State militants.

The reality is that the forces essentially line up today just as they did at the outbreak of this crisis in 2011: The West, Turkey and the gulf monarchies sponsor an array of death squads bent on bringing down the Syrian government, while Russia, Iran, Iraq, Syria (obviously) and Hezbollah resist this project. The rise of ISIS has not fundamentally changed this underlying dynamic. Indeed, the next-to-useless impact of the West’s year-long phony war against ISIS – alongside its relentless funneling of weaponry to militias with an, at best, ambiguous relationship with Al-Qaeda and ISIS – has demonstrated that the Syrian state (or “Assad” to use the West’s puerile personalization) remains the ultimate target of the West’s Syria policy. As Obama himself put it, the goal is not to eliminate ISIS, but rather to “contain” them – that is, keep them focused on weakening Syria and Iraq, and not US allies like Jordan, Turkey or the US’s favored Kurdish factions. In civil wars, there are only ever really two sides. And in the Syrian civil war, NATO remains on the same side as ISIS. In this sense, Putin was entirely correct when he commented on the Turkish attack that it had been a “stab in the back, carried out by the accomplices of terrorists” and asked:“do they want to make NATO serve ISIS?” Or, we could expand, is it that ISIS was created to serve NATO?

Russia’s direct entry into the Syrian conflict two months ago, however, has stirred the ‘regime change’ camp. Belying all their ‘anti-ISIS’ rhetoric, the US and Britain were openly worried that Russia might actually be putting up an effective fight against the group and restoring governmental authority to the ungoverned spaces in which it thrives. Immediately, the West began warning of ‘blowback’ against Russia, and ramped up advanced arms shipments to the insurgency. Within a month, a Russian passenger plane was blown up, with ISIS claiming responsibility and British Foreign Minister Philip Hammond calling the attack a “warning shot”. It was a “shot” alright, aimed not only at Russia, but also at her allies; the downing of the plane on Egyptian soil was a deliberate act of economic war against the Egyptian tourism industry, a punishment for Egypt’s support for Russia and Syria and its choking off of fighters to Syria since Abdel Fattah Sisi came to power. Then, two weeks later, came the attack on Paris. White supremacist niceties prevented Hammond calling this one a “warning shot” as well, but that is precisely what it was, this time directed at those within the regime change/ anti-Russia camp who were showing signs of ‘wobbling’. Francois Hollande suggested back in January that sanctions on Russia should be lifted as soon as possible, and more recently the nation showed a willingness to cooperate with Russia militarily over Syria: a ‘red line’ for France’s ‘Atlantic partners’.

Nevertheless, the net continues to close on the West’s death squad project in Syria. From the start the key to ISIS success has been, firstly, the porous Syria-Turkey border, through which Turkey has allowed a free flow of fighters and weapons back and forth for the past four years, and secondly, the massive amounts of finance ISIS receives both from oil sales and from donors in countries prepared to turn a blind eye to terror financing. In recent weeks, all of this has been threatened by the Russian-led alliance (of which France is increasingly willing to be a part).

The past week has seen a large scale Syrian ground offensive, supported with Russian air cover, in precisely the Syrian-Turkish border region which is the death squads’ lifeline: a move which prompted the Turkish foreign ministry to warn of “serious consequences” if the Russian airstrikes continued. Simultaneously, Russia embarked on a major campaign against ISIS’ reportedly 1,000-strong oil tanker fleet which is so crucial to the group’s financial success.

As the Institute for the Study of War reported, "Russian military chief of staff Col. Gen. Andrey Kartapolov announced on November 18 that 'Russian warplanes are now flying on a free hunt' against ISIS-operated oil tanker trucks traveling back and forth from Syria and Iraq, claiming that Russian strikes had destroyed over 500 ISIS-operated oil trucks in the past 'several days.'” This massive dent in the group’s oil transporting capacity even shamed the US into belatedly and somewhat half-heartedly launching similar attacks of their own. The smashing of ISIS’ oil industry will not only be a blow to the entire death squad project, but will directly affect Turkey, widely thought to be involved in the transportation of ISIS-produced oil, and even Erdogan’s family itself, as it is the company run by his son Bilal that is believed to be running the illicit trade.

Finally, France yesterday announced a crackdown on ISIS’ financiers, and demanded that other countries do the same. French Finance Minister Michel Sapin implied that the report to the G20 on the issue last month was a whitewash, and demanded that the international Financial Action Task Force be much more explicit in its report to the next G20 finance meeting in February about which countries are lax in terms of terror financing. The move is very likely to expose not only Turkey and Saudi Arabia but also, given HSBC’s links to Al Qaeda, the City of London. Indeed, as the Politico website noted, Sapin specifically said "that considering the reputation of the City of London, he would be 'vigilant' on the UK’s implementation of EU-agreed measures to clamp down on money laundering and exchange financial information on shady transactions or individuals”. The reactions to his demands that implementation of tougher EU regulations be moved forward will also be instructive (in another move exposing the total lack of urgency given to the West’s supposed ‘war on ISIS’, they are currently not due to be implemented for another two years).

And on top of all this, the UN Security Council finally passed a resolution authorizing ‘all necessary measures’ to be used against ISIS, Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups in Syria, effectively granting UN approval to Russia’s intervention. As Pepe Escobar has pointed out, French support for the resolution rendered it politically impossible for the US or UK to use their veto – although US ambassador Samantha Power, an extreme Russophobe and ‘regime changer’, registered her disapproval by failing to turn up for the vote and sending a junior official along instead.

In other words, on all sides the net is closing in on the West’s death squad project in Syria. Turkey’s actions today have merely demonstrated, again, the impotent rage of those who have thrown in their chips with a disastrous and bloody attempt to remake the Middle East. Syria is indeed becoming the Stalingrad of the regime changers – the rock on which the imperial folly of the West and it’s regional imitators may finally be broken.

Dan Glazebrook is a freelance political writer. His first book “Divide and Ruin: The West’s Imperial Strategy in an Age of Crisis” was published by Liberation Media in October 2013. It featured a collection of articles written from 2009 onwards examining the links between economic collapse, the rise of the BRICS, war on Libya and Syria and 'austerity'. He is currently researching a book on US-British use of sectarian death squads against independent states and movements from Northern Ireland and Central America in the 1970s and 80s to the Middle East and Africa today.

Russia cool to Turkish olive branches after downed plane
Originally published November 27, 2015 at 8:12 pm

Following the downing of a Russian warplane this week, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey on Friday proposed a face-to-face meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin and conceded, “We might have been able to prevent this violation of our airspace differently.”

By CEYLAN YEGINSU
The New York Times
ISTANBUL — Turkey took steps Friday to calm relations with Russia over the downing of a Russian warplane this week, calling for a presidential-level meeting, possibly at the climate talks in Paris next week.

“I would like to meet Putin face-to-face in Paris,” Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said Friday, referring to President Vladimir Putin of Russia. “I would like to bring the issue to a reasonable point. We are disturbed that the issue has been escalated.”


As that invitation was issued, the Turkish prime minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, said Turkey would “work with Russia and our allies to calm tensions.”

Erdogan also backed off his incendiary remark Thursday that, “Faced with the same violation today, Turkey would give the same response.” In a later interview with France 24 television, he admitted: “We might have been able to prevent this violation of our airspace differently.”

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He did not do a complete about-face, however. He warned Russia “not to play with fire” in reacting to the downing of the plane, adding: “We really attach a lot of importance to our relations with Russia, and we don’t want our relations to suffer in any way.”

Russia responded coolly to the tentative olive branches. The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, confirmed that Russia had received a phone call from Erdogan suggesting the meeting but had no further comment.

Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said that, as of Jan. 1, Russia was canceling its agreement on visa-free travel for Turks visiting Russia.

That should not have any immediate effect on Turkey’s tourism industry, as Russians will still be able to travel to Turkey without visas.

But Russia already had all but banned citizens from vacationing in Turkey in the wake of the downing of the plane, ordering travel agents to stop selling package tours.

With some 4.5 million Russians visiting Turkey in 2014, they made up about 12 percent of visitors, second only to Germans.


Several Russian news outlets reported that the government also was considering canceling all air travel between the countries as soon as the bulk of the estimated 10,000 Russians now in Turkey head home, but there was no official confirmation.

Putin said Russia would continue to cooperate with the U.S.-led coalition in its fight against the Islamic State group, but added that episodes like the downing of the plane could jeopardize the joint operation.

“We are ready to cooperate with the coalition, which is led by the United States,” Putin said after a meeting with President François Hollande of France. “But of course incidents like the destruction of our aircraft and the deaths of our servicemen” are unacceptable.

On Friday, Turkey’s Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus voiced hope that Russia would keep military and diplomatic channels open and added that Turkey was mulling possible measures in response to Russian economic sanctions.

Speaking after a Cabinet meeting in Ankara, Kurtulmus said Turkey would not have shot down the plane if it had known it was Russian and said this is what Turkish officials have told senior Russian officials. He added that if the pilots had responded to the Turkish warnings and informed them that they were Russians, the shooting wouldn’t have occurred.

In Moscow, the Russian air-force chief, Col.-Gen. Viktor Bondarev, said Turkey hadn’t issued any warnings on a previously agreed radio frequency before downing the plane. He insisted that the Russian SU-24 bomber hadn’t veered into Turkey’s airspace, and claimed that the Turkish F-16 jet fighter flew into Syria’s airspace for 40 seconds to down the Russian plane.

Speaking after a Cabinet meeting in Ankara, Kurtulmus said Turkey would not have shot down the plane if it had known it was Russian

"In reality, Russia can be innovative in weapons design, and sometimes ahead of the West. Occasionally the country pursues crazy ideas than cannot work, like mind control weaponry. Yet just as often they develop weapons with no counterparts in the U.S."