Turkey launches retaliatory attack on Syrian targets
Turkish armed forces have launched artillery attacks against Syria, in the first acknowledged direct involvement of an outside power in the 18 month conflict.
"Our armed forces in the border region responded immediately to this abominable attack in line with their rules of engagement; targets were struck through artillery fire against places in Syria identified by radar,” he said.
“Turkey will never leave unanswered such kinds of provocation by the Syrian regime against our national security."
There was no initial indication that the exchange of fire was a precursor to a wider use of force against the Syrian regime, and Mr Erdogan specified his order was in return for a mortar shell which struck the town of Akcakale earlier in the day.
But the Turkish authorities had already contacted NATO, of which the country is a member. It has previously suggested it might call on the alliance for help in dealing with Syria under the mutual defence terms of the NATO charter.
The initial mortar attack was a sign of the increasing desperation of the Syrian regime as it loses control of the north of the country.
Last month, rebels seized a northern border post with Turkey at Tal al-Abyad, and are now reported to be moving on the town of al-Raqqah.
It was regime mortar fire apparently aimed at rebel positions at Tal al-Abyad which fell on the wrong side of the border, killing five people including a woman and her three children. The Turkish government immediately lodged a protest with the United Nations, and then contacted Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Nato secretary-general, who “strongly condemned” the incident. It is not clear whether Nato was informed in advance of the retaliatory attack.
The attack on Aleppo levelled major buildings around the main Saadallah Jabri Square, the seat of a number of important government buildings.
Television footage from the scene, which is near the front line between rebel and regime forces in the city, showed a military officers’ club and a telecoms building reduced to rubble.
The once impressive facade of the Riga Palace Hotel was left a ragged patchwork of concrete. A further bomb just off the square, near Bab Jenine, wreaked similar damage on the chamber of commerce.
Syria’s state news agency put the death toll at 31. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 48 people died.
Residents told The Daily Telegraph that most of the victims were members of the security forces lodging in the buildings during the fighting which has consumed the city since mid-July.
“This area was where the regime housed many of its officers, and the hotels were full of its soldiers,” said a resident and opposition activist who called himself Abo Hamdo and who had just returned from the scene.
State media said the explosions were caused by suicide car bombers, and the footage showed a huge crater in the road nearby though no vehicle wreckage. The rest of the square, which connects the historic Old City to the south-east with the municipal park and prosperous, regime-held new city to the north and west, was reduced to dust.
The scale of the damage suggested far bigger explosive charges than those in previous car bombings, and there were immediate, competing conspiracy theories about whether the government version of events was true.
Some residents reported seeing jets in the area, though there was no explanation for what the government could hope to gain by staging an attack behind its own lines. More credibly, there were suggestions that the attacks could have been an “inside job” owing to the difficulty the Free Syrian Army would have had in getting cars laden with explosives through the many government checkpoints on roads leading to the square.
State television showed the supposed bodies of the suicide bombers, one still clutching a detonator, wearing army uniforms “as a disguise”, leading some to suggest they were defectors. An online video purporting to be from Jabhat al-Nusra, a jihadist group accused of ties to al-Qaeda, claimed responsibility.
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