Russia sends two warships armed with cruise missiles to Syria's coast

https://www.jpost.com/Breaking...-Syrias-coast-619174

Moscow also blamed Ankara for the killing of 33 Turkish soldiers in Syria's Idlib region the previous day.


Russia on Friday said it was sending two warships armed with cruise missiles to waters off the Syrian coast and blamed Ankara for the killing of 33 Turkish soldiers in Syria's Idlib region the previous day.

The killing of the Turkish soldiers on Thursday and the wounding of 32 others, announced by the governor in Turkey's Hatay province bordering Syria, raised the Turkish military death toll in the region to 54 this month.

Turkey has sent thousands of troops and heavy military hardware into Syria and Erdogan has warned that Turkey will launch a full-scale offensive to repel Syrian forces unless they pull back from Turkish observation posts in the region.

Though trying to coordinate their efforts on Syria, Russia backs Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, while Turkey backs rebel forces opposing Assad.

Responding to Thursday's killings, a senior Turkish official said on Friday that Ankara would no longer stop Syrian refugees from reaching Europe. Turkey blamed an air strike by Syrian government forces for the deaths.

Russia's Defence Ministry was cited by the RIA news agency on Friday however as saying that the Turkish troops had been hit by artillery fire from Syrian government forces who were trying to repel an offensive by rebel forces.

It was quoted as saying that Ankara had failed to notify Moscow of the presence of Turkish troops in the area hit by shelling despite being in regular communication with the Russian military.

The Turkish troops had been deployed directly alongside anti-government rebels, the ministry was cited as saying. But according to information provided by Turkey there were no Turkish troops in the area and Russia said that Turkish forces "shouldn't have been there."
Russian war planes did not carry out any air strikes in the area at the time of the incident and Moscow did everything it could to help once it learnt of the Turkish troop presence, the ministry was cited as saying.

That included ensuring Syrian forces stopped shelling to allow Turkey to evacuate its dead and wounded.

Separately, and as tensions between Ankara and Damascus rose, Russia's Black Sea Fleet was cited by the Interfax news agency on Friday as saying it was sending two warships equipped with Kalibr cruise missiles to waters off the Syrian coast.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: wcb6092,

The Middle East has been "hot" my entire life and throughout most of human history. Personally, I'm done with it. We have our own oil. Time to let them sort it out.

quote:

Originally posted by MNSIG:
The Middle East has been "hot" my entire life and throughout most of human history. Personally, I'm done with it. We have our own oil. Time to let them sort it out.

I agree,but it will effect us all in a negative way. Europe will become more destabilized because of mass refugees entering,and I would not be surprised if many more end up in the U.S.,especially if the Democrats regain control.Turkey is not a friend of the West.

This shows the wisdom of the US pulling back from there.

Let Turkey battle it out with Syria/Russia and let the Turkish prick that tried to play us against Russia deal with it.

The Russians stepped in there with Syria, thinking they were outmaneuvering the US and Trump but they've stepped back into another version of Afghanistan of the 80's.

Then there are the pompous Europeans that brag about all those social benefits they provide while we have been paying our money for their defense because they refused to participate. They sat back and opened their borders to the world and each other in their misguided experiment in social justice.

European refugees won't end up here in great numbers because they can't swim that far.
We need to focus on cleaning up our own back yard (Central and South America and Cuba) because those people are the ones that can walk/float here, and have. I have some sympathy for those people because they aren't the religious zealots, they are victims of a permanent corrupt government that has existed since well before their birth.

Note: Turkey is a NATO member. If they slug it out with Russia, we may have to get involved at some point.

quote:

Originally posted by 220-9er:
This shows the wisdom of the US pulling back from there.

Let Turkey battle it out with Syria/Russia and let the Turkish prick that tried to play us against Russia deal with it.

The Russians stepped in there with Syria, thinking they were outmaneuvering the US and Trump but they've stepped back into another version of Afghanistan of the 80's.

Then there are the pompous Europeans that brag about all those social benefits they provide while we have been paying our money for their defense because they refused to participate. They sat back and opened their borders to the world and each other in their misguided experiment in social justice.

European refugees won't end up here in great numbers because they can't swim that far.
We need to focus on cleaning up our own back yard (Central and South America and Cuba) because those people are the ones that can walk/float here, and have. I have some sympathy for those people because they aren't the religious zealots, they are victims of a permanent corrupt government that has existed since well before their birth.

quote:

Note: Turkey is a NATO member. If they slug it out with Russia, we may have to get involved at some point.

Just tell them to pound sand! Turkey is (IMO) probably the biggest problem in the region!

I have no qualms about telling them to "stuff it" if they cause more unrest and fighting in the region.

I did a year as a military advisor in western Iran (Kurdistan). Found the Kurds to be peaceful, proud of being Kurds, hospitable, etc.

Leave them the hell alone. And if they want to actually reclaim land that was taken from them by the "international community" decades ago, that is their task. Not ours, or even the UN.

quote:

Originally posted by 220-9er:
Let Turkey battle it out with Syria/Russia and let the Turkish prick that tried to play us against Russia deal with it.

Agreed.

quote:

Originally posted by 220-9er:
The Russians stepped in there with Syria, thinking they were outmaneuvering the US and Trump but they've stepped back into another version of Afghanistan of the 80's.

Yup again.

quote:

Originally posted by BBMW:
Note: Turkey is a NATO member. If they slug it out with Russia, we may have to get involved at some point.

I've a better idea: Throw Turkey out of NATO. They never should have been granted membership in the first place, IMO.

Let Turkey learn the hard way the folly of playing such games.

quote:

Originally posted by Elk Hunter:
Just tell them to pound sand! Turkey is (IMO) probably the biggest problem in the region!

They are now.

quote:

Originally posted by Elk Hunter:
I did a year as a military advisor in western Iran (Kurdistan). Found the Kurds to be peaceful, proud of being Kurds, hospitable, etc.

That, right there, is why Turkey is doing what they're doing: The Kurds. And the Kurds, IMO, are the people to whom the U.S. should be showing loyalty.

[QUOTE]Originally posted by BBMW:
Note: Turkey is a NATO member. If they slug it out with Russia, we may have to get involved at some point.

NATO, and especially Turkey's involvement, is a throwback to the cold war. A marriage of convenience at the time. They just happened to be located is such a strategic location and played that for all it was worth.
Anytime we have needed them to do something for us in the last thirty years, they have declined. The only real value was to base and store some nukes and provide some land for our airbase.
Their present leader is a bad guy trying to recreate the Ottoman Empire so he becomes the leader of the region. That whole mess right now is a face-off between him and the Iranians for control in the region. Hopefully they will beat each other down.
Much like the Euro countries that we had a mutual need for when the Iron Curtain existed. We now get more cooperation from the new perimeter countries that were formerly occupied by the Russians/Soviet Union, and those farther west are less needed.

We need them for access to the Black Sea, and, if push comes to show, to control Russia's access to the Mediterranean.

Not to mention we have a major and strategic air force base there.

quote:

Originally posted by 220-9er:
This shows the wisdom of the US pulling back from there.

Let Turkey battle it out with Syria/Russia and let the Turkish prick that tried to play us against Russia deal with it.

The Russians stepped in there with Syria, thinking they were outmaneuvering the US and Trump but they've stepped back into another version of Afghanistan of the 80's.

Then there are the pompous Europeans that brag about all those social benefits they provide while we have been paying our money for their defense because they refused to participate. They sat back and opened their borders to the world and each other in their misguided experiment in social justice.

European refugees won't end up here in great numbers because they can't swim that far.
We need to focus on cleaning up our own back yard (Central and South America and Cuba) because those people are the ones that can walk/float here, and have. I have some sympathy for those people because they aren't the religious zealots, they are victims of a permanent corrupt government that has existed since well before their birth.

I wouldn’t say the pompous Europeans, it was mostly Germany thanks to Merkel the great.

Turkey opens gates into Europe as migrants gather on border

Turkey's Erdoğan has long-threatened he'd do this if the EU and the U.S. didn't "do something" to address the threat Syria and Russia pose to its invasion force in the north of Syria and give Turkey a bunch of cash. Now he's done it.

IMO it's time for the EU and the U.S. to stop bowing to Erdoğan's games and threats. Tell Turkey EU membership is entirely off the table, rescind any preferential trade deals, halt all economic aid to Turkey, and begin moving to revoke Turkey's NATO membership.

Erdogan: Expect 30,000 Refugees At Europe's Borders Saturday After Turkey 'Opened Gates'

https://www.zerohedge.com/geop...-turkey-opened-gates

Despite a 2016 agreement with the EU to stop refugee flows out of Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Saturday that 18,000 refugees stood ready along Turkish borders with Europe to pour into the continent.

In his first public comments since Thursday's deaths of 33 Turkish troops in Idlib, likely by a Russian airstrike (though Ankara has preferred to blame Syrian forces), Erdogan said this number will likely climb to as many as 30,000 on Saturday.

"We are not in a situation to handle a new wave of refugees" from Syria, he said, after previously threatening repeatedly to "open the gates" on the over 3 million Syrian refugees Turkey is hosting.

It looks like he's now making good on this threat, though questions remain over if this is truly the beginning of a 2015 level flood, or a foretaste of what could come:

“We will not close these doors in the coming period and this will continue. Why? The European Union needs to keep its promises. We don’t have to take care of this many refugees, to feed them,” Erdogan said.

He also reiterated and underscored that some 1.5 million refugees were ready to exit war-torn Idlib amid the Syrian-Russian offensive intensifying in the south of the province. Turkey is now in an open war situation with the Syrian Army, claiming to have killed scores of Syrian national troops and paramilitary forces over the last days.

Buses were even seen staged in Istanbul to facilitate this. Evidence emerged throughout Friday that Turkish authorities were indeed actively pushing groups of refugees toward Greece, while Greece announced emergency security measures and a military response to block illegal entry, also sealing its main land cross with Turkey at Kastanies to all inbound.

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis vowed that "no illegal entries into Greece will be tolerated" - noting greatly tightened security along the EU's external borders.

Meanwhile, NATO and the EU have called on Erdogan to honor Turkish commitments to halt flows of refugees into Europe, obviously to no avail.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: wcb6092,

Greece pushes back migrants after Turkish border 'onslaught

https://www.reuters.com/articl...laught-idUSKBN20N0GE

Greek police fired teargas to push back hundreds of stone-throwing migrants trying to cross the border from Turkey on Saturday, as a crisis over Syria shifted onto the European Union’s doorstep.

Greece, which has tense relations with Turkey, accused Ankara of sending the migrants to the border post in an organized “onslaught” and said it would keep them out.

Turkey said on Thursday it would stop keeping hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers in its territory after an air strike on Idlib in neighboring Syria killed 33 Turkish soldiers.

Convoys of people appeared heading toward the land and sea borders of Greece, which was a gateway for hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers into Europe in 2015 and 2016.

“They (the migrants) didn’t come here on their own. They are being sent away and being used by (our) neighbor, Turkey,” Greek Public Order Minister Michalis Chrysohoidis told reporters near the northern Greek border town of Kastanies.

“Greece... faced an organized, mass and illegal attempt to violate its borders and it withstood this attempt,” government spokesman Stelios Petsas said, adding that by Saturday morning authorities had prevented more than 4,000 people from entering Greece.

The crisis is the first big policy test for Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who was elected in July and promised a tougher stance on immigration.

Turkey hit back at the Greek accusations.

“Look who’s lecturing us on international law! They’re shamelessly throwing tear gas bombs on thousands of innocents piled at their gates,” Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu tweeted, along with pictures of hundreds of people sitting outside the Greek border post.

“We don’t have an obligation to stop people leaving our country but Greece has the duty to treat them as human beings!”

The European Union said it was supporting Greece - and its neighbor Bulgaria, which also shares a border with Turkey - in protecting the bloc’s borders, but also sought to placate Ankara.

It expressed its condolences with Turkey over the deadly Idlib strike in a statement and said the bloc was ready to step up humanitarian support.

Nearly 1 million refugees and migrants crossed from Turkey to Greece’s islands in 2015, but that route all but closed after a EU-Turkey pact in March 2016. Under the deal, Ankara had agreed to help stem the flow of migrants crossing into Europe in return for billions of euros in EU aid.

“The EU is actively engaged to uphold the EU-Turkey (migration pact) and to support Greece and Bulgaria to protect the EU’s external borders,” European Council President Charles Michel, who chairs the 27 national leaders of the bloc, said after a call with Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan.

The head of the bloc’s executive European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said the EU was ready to involve its border agency Frontex to help control the land border.
‘TITANIC EFFORT’

Erdogan said on Saturday some 18,000 migrants had already crossed from Turkey into Europe. Speaking in Istanbul, he did not provide evidence for the number but said it would rise.

Bulgaria said it had seen no migrant inflows.

Earlier, a Reuters witness said there were about 500 people between the Greek and Turkish border posts, and beyond that on the Turkish side, hundreds more.

The International Organization for Migration put the number of people along the Greek-Turkish border at 13,000. As the sun set, it said, buses in Turkish cities were still being loaded with people bound for the border area.

Overnight, demonstrators hurled flaming pieces of wood at police in Kastanies, amateur footage filmed by a policeman on the scene, which was seen by Reuters, showed. Police fired teargas to keep people back.

Kastanies is about 900 km (550 miles) north-east of Athens.

“We are making a titanic effort to keep our borders closed to such migration flows,” said border guard head Panagiotis Harelas, showing empty tear gas canisters that he said were hurled from the Turkish side. They had Turkish writing on them.

A Greek government official said that in the space of an hour, 20 hand-held teargas canisters were thrown from the Turkish side.

Greece has asked for an emergency meeting of EU foreign affairs ministers to discuss the migrant issue, a diplomatic source said.
‘TODAY IS GOOD’

Reuters video showed tens of people at a time climbing, and some throwing their bags over a three-meter (10-foot) fence covered with barbed wire along the Greek border in Turkey’s western Edirne province.

A group of Afghans with children waded across the fast-moving waters of the Evros river and took refuge in a chapel. They crossed into Greece on Friday morning.

“Today is good,” Shir Agha, 30, said in broken English.

Their shoes were caked in mud. Temperatures were close to freezing.

Greece had already said it would tighten border controls to prevent coronavirus reaching its Aegean islands, where thousands of migrants are living in poor conditions.

quote:

Originally posted by wcb6092:
Greece pushes back migrants after Turkish border 'onslaught

Last time I checked, there are two sides of a border. Just because one country "opens the gates" doesn't mean the country on the side can't keep their gates closed.

"The International Organization for Migration"... who the heck are these people? Another Soros funded group I suspect.

Sounds like they might need a...wall.

Well, how 'bout that?

I wonder if or when Greece will start stacking bodies.

Turkey lost these soldiers fighting in another country.
NATO isn’t required to “defend” them any more than NATO had to defend us in the Middle East.
If the Syrians and Russians were to go into Turkey and actually attack them, that might be a different story.
Good to watch this mess from a distance for once.

I envision that Europe's invasion of Muslims will create a euro-safe spot in Syria...

Don't forget, it is the Syrian Arab Republic.

We know, that Aleppo has long been a hotly sought and contested city and the region around that.

And strategic.

The majority (but not all) of crude oil and gas from the NE and E Syrian regions, is shipped through Aleppo.

Evidently, Erdogan isn't playing around with Syria/Russia. In retaliation for the 33 soldiers killed in Syria, Turkey employed a drone swarm attack which was apparently very successful in taking out artillery, S-400 missile sites, and even aircraft. While several nations use armed drones in mission focused actions, it is the first coordinated attack by a fleet of armed drones I'm aware of.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/...-BB10BdPA?ocid=ientp

Turkey deployed swarms of killer drones to strike Russian-backed Syrian government forces, in what a senior official said was a military innovation that demonstrated Ankara’s technological prowess on the battlefield.

The retaliation for the killing last week of 33 Turkish soldiers by Syrian forces involved an unprecedented number of drones in coordinated action, said the senior official in Turkey with direct knowledge of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Syria policy. It was the first time a country had commanded the air space over such a large area using drone swarms, according to the official.


The series of strikes since Thursday by dozens of the remotely-controlled aircraft targeted Syrian bases and chemical warfare depots, the Turkish military said. But Turkey also located and destroyed some Syrian missile-defense systems, raising questions about the effectiveness of the Russian-made equipment intended to deter such air attacks.

“That’s something only Israel had been recorded publicly to have done until now,” Charles Lister, director of the Extremism and Counterterrorism Program at the Middle East Institute, said on Twitter, in reference to video footage taken by a Turkish drone allegedly showing the destruction of a Syrian army air-defense system. Turkey was waging an “air campaign run entirely by armed drones backed up” by heavy rocket artillery, he said.

The tactic threatens to bring NATO member Turkey into direct confrontation with Russia, adding to strains in relations between Erdogan and Russian President Vladimir Putin as they prepare to meet this week in an effort to ease tensions over Syria. The two leaders have worked together to try to end the Syrian civil war, despite backing opposing sides, but have repeatedly stumbled over who should control the northwestern Syrian province of Idlib that borders Turkey.

Russia dominates the skies over Syria as part of Putin’s military support of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, deploying advanced S-400 missile-defense systems to secure the air space while its warplanes aid Syrian forces battling to take the last rebel stronghold in Idlib. Turkish forces back the rebels and Ankara says it fears a fresh exodus of refugees flocking into Turkey if Idlib falls to Assad.

Syria reacted to the Turkish drone campaign by declaring the air space in Idlib closed, the state-run Syrian Arab News Agency reported Sunday. “Any aircraft that violates the Syrian airspace will be dealt with as a hostile aircraft that must be downed,” SANA reported, citing an unnamed military official.

Turkey announced Sunday that its forces had shot down two Syrian Su-24 warplanes and destroyed three more Syrian air defense systems, while confirming that one armed Turkish drone was hit.

Turkey wants to carve out a zone that it controls in northern Syria as part of efforts to resettle millions of Syrian refugees currently in Turkey. Putin has said Assad’s forces should control all of Syria’s territory as the best way to guarantee Turkey’s border security.

Russia denied involvement in the Feb. 27 air strike that inflicted the biggest single-day loss of Turkish troops for decades, though Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow can’t prevent Syrian forces striking at “terrorists” on their soil. Turkish officials accuse Moscow of doing too little to rein in Assad.

Turkey has long hosted the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s Anatolian Eagle military exercises, which simulate attacks on similar Russian missile-defense systems including with electronic warfare. Israeli forces also participated in the drills once. Turkey deployed an array of electronic jammers in Syria before it launched the drone strikes as part of its “Spring Shield” campaign.

Ankara appeared eager to show off its aerial firepower. The Defense Ministry posted a series of videos on Twitter showing Syrian tanks and artillery being destroyed in apparent drone attacks.