TURKEY FRIEND OR FOE

Russia Today has published a very interesting and credible idea about what happened last Friday regarding the Turkish plane that Syria shot down.

The Turkish military jet's incursion into Syria may have been a botched NATO operation on counterfeiting Syrian military aircraft ID in order to fool the country’s air defense. The necessary codes could have been “borrowed” from the Syrian fighter that had been stolen by its defector pilot.

This theory, explaining why the Turkish reconnaissance plane entered Syrian airspace before being taken down, was voiced by Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, which cited unnamed sources in the Syrian security forces.

Syrians believe that the Friday incident has its roots in last week’s defection of a Syrian pilot who escaped in his MiG-21 fighter jet to Jordan. Damascus branded the defector a traitor, while Jordanian authorities gave him asylum.

The defection brings memories of a similar incident that took place in February 2011, when two Libyan pilots “delivered” their military aircraft to Malta. NATO’s bombing campaign, which ended with the fall of the Muammar Gaddafi’s government, started just a month after.

Military analysts note that, curiously, the Libyan air defense systems appeared to be helpless against NATO’s air strikes. The explanation may lie in the friend-or-foe systems that the two stolen aircraft had onboard, the newspaper suggests. This system is used by the military in combat to distinguish their own aircraft.

According to the newspaper, the Syrian military believe that NATO took a similar approach again, but failed to properly decipher the codes. This is evident by the fact that the defector pilot managed to send his family to Turkey before stealing the fighter jet, which means the act was probably not done out of a sudden emotional breakdown.

Turkey may have been given the task by NATO to test how well the job was performed, and the result was disastrous, the report explains.

This is only a theory and more trivial explanations cannot be ruled out – but the intrusion is more likely to have been part of a military operation rather than the mistake Turkey claims it to be, military experts say.

[source : Turkey's downed jet: NATO action in disguise?, RT, http://www.rt.com/news/turkish-plane-nato-syria-725/, 26/06/2012]

I would go one step further and add that if the flight was designed to test the IFF code assumed to have been given by the Syrian defector then NATO and Turkey would have thought of the consequences if the code was wrong and the plane was shot down. I would also assume that the pilots of this Turkish plane were warned that the mission could be a virtual suicide mission, which is why the families of the pilots of the families have not been shown on NATO media crying their hearts out over their loss.