Cid_Yama wrote:So the plane, which had been bombing targets in the Turkmen Mountains which are in Syria, an area inhabited by Syrian Turkmens, who are Syrians of Turkish descent, crashed in the Syrian Turkmen Mountains, and one of the pilots has been captured by Syrian Turkmen in Syria.
Doesn't sound like they were in Turkish airspace, and it sounds intentional, in support of the Syrian Turkmens, who were being bombed by those planes. Who have now captured one pilot, and are looking to capture the other one.
I had CNN on and they were saying what you just said Cid, that while Turkey says Russia crossed its airspace, generally yes this is about supporting Syrian ethnic *Turkmen* that were getting bombed by Russia.
There's so much complexity to all this region, one cannot even fully understand Iraq and then Syria and now there's this "turkmen" thing that I never heard of before.
So I wonder -- what are the "turkmen" like? Are these radicals? Are they ISIS allies, what the hell are the "turkmen in syria?"
Why is Russia bombing so close to the Turkish border, is that really responsible of Russia or did they have good cause, like getting after some oil trucks headed that way or something like that? Or wtf was Russia doing, just bombing "turkmen villages" and then yeah the "turks" in "turkey" get upset about the "turkemen" in syria getting bombed.
And then I wonder where the kurds are in all of this. Do the turkmen fight the kurds? That would explain why Turkey wants to back "turkmen." Or, maybe the turkmen in syria are a hedge against kurds (turkey suppresses turkish kurdish minority in turkey).
Added to all this is the fact that Erdogan suppresses a lot of his people in Turkey and has been drifting dictator and has been going muslim fundy for years now -- to the distress, and alarm of many turks that want to keep turkey how it always was since Attaturk -- SECULAR muslim. *Not* a muslim fundy place.
Anthony Bourdain had a whole hour show on Turkey recently, it was really in depth and pretty good but I knew about these issues before that.
So anyhow, there's issues about Erdogan that really the Obama admin and Europe should have been paying attention to, years ago. Just that he's been making himself a dictator and pulling the country to fundy muslim.
So I don't who's good guy or bad guy in this, why Russia was bombing turkmen on the border -- what was the reason, maybe it was a good one (I do want to see ISIS defeated) but yet that's also a touchy thing to be bombing on the turkish border.
In general, Russia has a lot of ties to turkey -- it's the #2 holiday destination for Russians (news reports that Putin got on tv and is asking Russians to cancel holiday plans in Turkey).
Russia is also building a gas pipeline through Turkey, to go into greece, with plans to get away from Ukraine transit by 2018.
So there are long term ties and interests between Russia and Turkey, hopefully Russo-Turk problems don't get too bad, Gazprom does have a pipeline that needs to get built after all.
Generally, Russia really has been violating nato airspace in MANY member states for a couple years now. So, there's that.
With Russia being aggressive in so many places, this was bound to happen. They went into Syria but started hitting moderate rebels, not ISIS. Then they did start hitting ISIS and doing a good job on that, but now it's "turkmen in syria" off the turkish border so what's that all about?
And before all this started, Russian air force was crossing / riding up close on airspace all over nato, from the UK to the Baltics to Canada and US and all over.
edit: as a brief post script, in general I'm concerned by ISIS and that needs to be defeated more than I'm bothered by Russia flying up on / flying over borders the way Russia's been doing for a year now all over nato. But yeah, ISIS is still worse. The other is still a problem though (Russia crossing nato borders), and at the end of the day Turkey is a NATO ally.
What everything keeps coming back to is that liberals and libertarians / isolationist tea party are WRONG and their do-nothing foreign policy makes things so much more dangerous.
The policy we have needed on all this thing, all along, would be Jeb Bush and John McCain and Lindsay Graham. Those guys are right, they've been right all this time, and we're seeing that now.