Syrian news agencies report that the Turkish military plane lost over the sea opposite the Turkish-Syrian border Friday Friday, June 22, was shot down by Syrian air defense forces. Radar and radio contact was lost with the F-4 plane shortly after it took off from eastern Erhac Airport not far from the Syrian port of Latakia. DEBKAfile’s military sources report: Syria laid an ambush for the Turkish warplane in revenge for the defection of a Syrian Air Force pilot a day earlier with his MiG-21 warplane.
Read moreDEBKAfile Special Report
Syrian President Bashar Assad Thursday night, June 21, ordered his entire Air Force fleet of fighter bombers grounded to guard against more defections. Syrian officials are sure that the defection of Col. Hasan Merhi al-Hamadeh, who flew to Jordan aboard a MiG-21, was set up by the CIA - with more to come, to show the Syrian people and Arab world that even the Syrian air force, the part of the armed forces most loyal to Assad, was in fact slipping away from him.
DEBKAfile DEBKA-Net-Weekly
Russian President Vladimir Putin is in over-drive to recover Moscow’s overriding influence in the Arab world, which it lost to the United States in 1973. To roll the march of history back 39 years, Putin is enlisting China and Iran. The comingDEBKA-Net-Weekly issue out next Friday focuses on Russia’s comeback and Barack Obama’s prospects of pushing it back, given his reliance on the sympathy of the Muslim Brotherhood and the backing of an unpopular Turkey and a systematically disempowered Israel.
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