The Syrian military says it has shot down a Turkish fighter jet "over its territorial waters", risking a new crisis between Middle Eastern neighbours already at bitter odds over a 16-month-old revolt against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
"Our air defences confronted a target that penetrated our air space over our territorial waters pre-afternoon on Friday and shot it down. It turned out to be a Turkish military plane," a statement by the military circulated on state media said.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's office confirmed the incident in which two pilots went missing.
"As a result of information obtained from the evaluation of our concerned institutions and from within the joint search and rescue operations with Syria, it is understood that our plane was brought down by Syria," Erdogan's office said in a statement.
Turkey would decide on its response to the incident once all of the details became clear, it said in the statement, issued after a two-hour meeting between Erdogan, members of his cabinet and the military.
Al Jazeera’s Anita McNaught, reporting from Istanbul, said: "What those necessary measures are in Turkey’s views, whether it will be taking it alone or invoking its membership of NATO or calling for wider support, we don’t know."
"Beyond that, what was a Turkish fighter bomber plane doing in Syrian airspace in the first place as per Turkish military," she said.
"We don’t know how the plane was downed and how the international community is going to support Turkey in whatever response it decides to take."
The military has said a search and rescue operation for the two pilots of the F-4 plane was under way, the Anatolia state news agency said.
'Escalation in tensions'
The jet had lost radio contact with its base over the eastern Mediterranean near Syria's Latakia, an army statement said earlier.
Ankara had said earlier that it had lost contact with one of its military aircraft off its southeastern coast after it took off from Erhac airport in the eastern province of Malatya.
NATO-member Turkey, which had drawn close to Syria before the uprising against Assad, turned against the Syrian leader when he responded violently to pro-democracy protests inspired by popular upheavals elsewhere in the Arab world.
Ankara has previously floated the possibility of setting up some kind of safe haven or humanitarian corridor inside Syria, which would entail military intervention, but has said it would undertake no such action without UN Security Council approval.
Al Jazeera's McNaught said: "This is a dramatic escalation in tensions between two neighbouring countries. Relations have been bad for many months and the worse was when the Syrian army fired on a Turkish refugee camp holding Syrian refugees."
"At that point Turkey invoked issues of national sovereignty; it was seen as a bit of over-reaction then.
"We are in a completely different territory now."
So, it appears that Turkish Forces were deliberately attacked by Syrian forces, What do you NSGers think will happen to the Syrian Question now? Will Turkey intervene? Or will only empty threats come of it?
I personally think that only some sanctions and empty threats will some out of it, seeing as Turkey can't afford to piss off China and Russia, but can't afford to lose face at home
