A Stab in the Back!

Darko Lazar

"Get out of your trucks now, and run away from them."

Those were the words plastered across hundreds of leaflets dropped over Syria from American warplanes, over forty minutes before airstrikes targeted dozens of oil trucks belonging to Daesh.

A Russian Su-24 tactical bomber, which was shot down over northern Syria on Tuesday by a Turkish F-16 fighter jet was extended no such courtesy.

A local Turkish television crew just happened to be nearby to capture the burning Su-24 plummeting from the sky.

Turkish-backed militants were standing by on the Syrian side of the border waiting to finish off the Russian pilots.

Captain Sergey Rumyantsev was brutally killed by the armed men. But his co-pilot Konstantin Murakhtin - probably much to Ankara's dismay - managed to evade capture, and was rescued by Syrian and Russian special ops units.

The Turks claimed that the ‘unidentified' aircraft had entered its airspace and was warned "ten times in five minutes" to turn back.

But as Murakhtin later explained, "In actual fact, there were no warnings at all. You need to understand the difference in speed between a tactical bomber like a Su-24, and that of the F16. If they wanted to warn us, they could have sat on our wing."

Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had previously pointed out that the shooting down of the Russian bomber "looks very much like a preplanned provocation".

In the aftermath of the incident, Turkey's President Recep Tayep Erdogan came out swinging.

Instead of working to ease the inevitable diplomatic storm, Erdogan refused to apologize to the Kremlin, demanding instead a Russian apology over the alleged violation of his country's airspace.

Prime Minister Ahmet Davetoglu went a step further, threatening to shoot down more planes found to be ‘violating' Turkish airspace.

Thus Russia's President Vladimir Putin was spot on when he accused Ankara of intentionally bringing relations with Moscow to a ‘gridlock'.

But it's not just Ankara.

Erdogan and his cronies are putting NATO's interests above that of the Turkish people. As a NATO member state - at this late stage in the Syrian conflict that has been a foreign policy blunder for just about every politician who jumped on the ‘Assad must go' bandwagon - it is unlikely that Ankara has much of a choice.

NATO's Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, whose organization and position have been reinvigorated with the manufacturing of the New Cold War, stopped short of applauding Turkey.

The name of the game; to surround Russia with unfriendly regimes that are more than willing to engage in an act of lunacy on occasion and draw up policies, which are in complete contradiction with the interests of their own nations - AKA the Kiev Doctrine.

Russia's response - although subtle and proportionate - to what can only be described as an act of war by Turkey, cannot be avoided. Moscow's countermeasures are likely to target Ankara's diplomatic, economic and energy sectors.

This has already put the Turkey Stream project in serious jeopardy. The pipeline running across the Black Sea from Russia would have made Turkey a major hub for natural gas exports to the EU.

If scrapped altogether, the Russians will inevitably take a hit too. The Stream was the sole route for Moscow's future supplies of natural gas to Western Europe. The deal, announced in December 2014 after Putin's visit to Turkey, was a slap in the face for Washington.

Thus, Putin was once again right on the money when he called the shooting down of the Russian plane a ‘stab in the back'.

US Republican senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, along with buddies like Stoltenberg and Erdogan across the Atlantic, have engineered just about every crisis concerning Russia over the past decade. While watching the Russian Sukhoi plane nose-diving into the ground, one would imagine that they would have been patting each other on the back.

"Clearly the US idea here is to drive a larger wedge between Turkey and Russia. This of course must work to some extent because Russia must respond for any number of practical reasons," says the Director at the Center for Syncretic Studies in Belgrade, Joaquine Flores.

The ‘preplanned provocation' by Turkey against Russia clearly establishes members of the so-called US-led coalition against Daesh as supporters of terrorist groups operating in Syria.

And while, in theory, the Russia/Iran/Syria/Hizbullah alliance has been fighting the same enemy as the US-led coalition, the reality has seen geopolitical disparities turn into direct confrontation.

Bombing Iraq and Syria for over a year, the US-led coalition did not see fit to target oil trucks belonging to Daesh, which generate over 50 million dollars in revenue every month, after being smuggled to none other than Turkey.

US-led airstrikes targeting the terrorists' black gold were only launched [not before dropping leaflets to warn Daesh of the incoming attacks] following Russia's military intervention in Syria, which devastated militant positions, exposing the American-led strategy as intentionally ineffective.

The shooting down of the Russian plane is undoubtedly an escalation on the part of Ankara and its NATO backers, but one that was very likely anticipated in Moscow.

The downing of the Su-24 came less than twenty-four hours after Putin visited Tehran and met with the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Khamenei. The strengthening of this relationship is shaping up to produce a global alliance, which could very well rule out the possibility of any future western military intervention in parts of the Middle East.

That's what's at stake for Erdogan and co.

So how should the Russians respond?

Editor-in Chief at Al-Masdar News Leith Abou Fadel thinks that, "Russia is going to keep doing what they're doing. The Syrian Army has gained a lot of ground... this is one of the reasons why Turkey is so aggravated by the Russian airstrikes."

Source: al-Ahed News