Syrian troops can’t be two place at once. They must either leave the Turk’s advance on the boarder unchecked, or they must pull troops that are supressing the revolution up to the boarder to keep an eye on the Turks. Giving the Turks an opportunity to rattle sabres and bring troops to the boarder was a huge mistake on Syria’s part.
If this is something we engineered out of State, with the help of Defense, then it is brilliant. Stupid to take on the Turks. Syrians can’t take on the rebels and the Turks at the same time.
An extremely clean way of resolving the situation, if this in fact was engineered somehow by us. The Lebanese hate both the Russians and the Syrians. Haven’t heard much from them in all of this.
Syria had no choice. An unidentified plane was flying at low altitude into their airspace. It was just a few years ago that Israel bombed the Syrian nuclear research facility. Turkey knows this and initially Erodgen accepted the apology from Syria. Then he apparently completely changed his mind. So somebody decided to escalate the situation.