As Turkey was shuddering from scandals involving corruption, wiretaps and the closing down of Twitter as it neared the March 30 local elections, the Syria crisis came as a lifesaver to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. As the threat that al-Qaeda was going to attack the sovereign Turkish enclave of the Tomb of Suleiman Shah inside Syria turned out to be a non-event albeit one that kept Turkey’s agenda busy for a few days, the real bomb came with the shooting down of a Syrian warplane that was attacking opposition fighters trying to capture the Syrian town of Kassab on the Turkish border. With the shooting down of the plane, the election rallies of the governing party immediately assumed the atmosphere of “our victorious prime minister.”

Turkey — by shooting down the Syrian plane in Turkish airspace over the town of Yayladagi in Hatay province — has now inflicted a second revenge against the shooting down of a Turkish RF-4E Phantom with its two pilots over the Mediterranean near the Syrian border in 2012. On Sept. 16, 2013, Turkey had shot down a Syrian M-17 helicopter over Yayladagi with F-16 fire. 

One plane left the scene but the other resisted

According to a statement by Turkey’s Chief of General Staff, two Syrian MiG-23 planes were detected at 1:01 p.m. local time by the Diyarbakir Air Control Center when they were 80 nautical miles away. The planes were warned four times when they were within 10 miles of Turkish airspace. After the warnings, one of the planes disengaged and left the area without entering Turkish airspace but the other, around 1:13 p.m., violated the Turkish airspace for about 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) in the area of the Camli Tepe border post. The plane then turned west and flew about 1.5 kilometers (nearly a mile) in Turkish airspace. At 1:14 p.m., a Turkish F-16 that was on patrol in the region hit the Syrian plane with a missile as per rules of engagement. The plane that was hit crashed in Syrian territory about 1,200 meters (nearly 4,000 feet) from the border in the region of Kassab.