Another ugly turn in Syria
In an airstrike in northwest Syria late Thursday, an attack that changed the course of the Syrian war. Now, there is a possibility of a potential conflict between Russia and Turkey, a NATO member. The Turkish Army suffered mass casualties in the strike, officials said.
At least 33 Turkish soldiers were killed and more than 30 wounded, said Rahmi Dogan, the Turkish governor of the southern province of Hatay, where the Turkish casualties were arriving.
Turkish officials said that the strike had been carried out by Syrian government forces, but Russian jets have been conducting most of the airstrikes in the area in recent weeks. Turkish protesters in Istanbul united on the Russian Consulate there early Friday, chanting “Murderer Russia! Murderer Putin!”
However, Turkish officials have avoided blaming the Russian government for aggression against their forces in Syria, hoping to avoid a direct confrontation with Russia’s much stronger military and to keep the door open for talks with Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey convened an emergency meeting Thursday evening in Ankara, Turkish media reported. Also, Turkish forces began retaliating Thursday against Syrian forces in north-eastern Idlib Province.
Mr. Erdogan called for a Turkish-controlled safe zone in the region for the displaced civilians. Turkey has asked the United States for Patriot missiles to help defend its troops, and called for NATO to enforce a no-fly zone to protect the nearly three million civilians in Idlib Province.
“The attack against Turkey is an attack against NATO,” Omer Celik, the spokesman for Mr. Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, said on the CNN Turk news channel. “NATO should have been with Turkey, not starting today but from before these events. We are expecting concrete actions on the safe zone and no-fly zone.”
On Wednesday, Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper told members of the House Armed Services Committee that the United States was not looking to reassert its presence there.
“There has not been that discussion about re-engaging in the civil war,” he said. “We think the best path forward is through the U.N. process that is underway.”
“The prospects of a direct military confrontation between Turkey & Russia in Syria are very high & increasing by the hour,” Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, said in a tweet. Mr. Erdogan, he said, “is on the right side here. Putin & Assad are responsible for this horrific humanitarian catastrophe.”
Kay Bailey Hutchison, the American ambassador to NATO, told reporters in Washington on Thursday that “everything is on the table.”
“This is a big development,” Ms. Hutchison said, “and our alliance is with Turkey, it is not with Russia.” She added, “We want Turkey to understand that we are the ones that they’ve been allied with.”
There is more this council can and must do to stop the suffering,” Foreign Minister Heiko Maas of Germany and Deputy Prime Minister Alexander De Croo of Belgium told the council in a joint statement on Thursday morning.
Ursula Mueller, the assistant secretary general for humanitarian affairs, told council members that the deprivations facing civilians in northwest Syria were “not humanly tolerable.” Henrietta Fore, the executive director of UNICEF, who is to visit Syria this weekend, said “we desperately need a cessation of hostilities in northwest Syria.”
Russian state news services did not report on the strike by late Thursday, but they cited military officials blaming Turkey for supporting militants who are targeting Russian positions.
