U.S. units going to Turkey to intercept Syria missiles

A Syrian rebel ÿres through a wall Friday during a battle with government forces in Tal Sheer.
A Syrian rebel ÿres through a wall Friday during a battle with government forces in Tal Sheer.

— Defense Secretary Leon Panetta signed an official deployment order Friday to send 400 U.S. military personnel and two Patriot air defense batteries to Turkey as its cross-border tensions intensify with Syria.

Government forces in Syria have increasingly resorted to aerial attacks, including use of ballistic missiles, to fight a spreading insurgency.

The U.S. batteries will be part of a broader push to strengthen Turkey’s defenses that will include the deployment of four other Patriot batteries — two from Germany and two from the Netherlands. Each battery contains multiple rounds of guided missiles that can intercept and destroy other missiles and hostile aircraft flying at high speeds.

Panetta’s deployment order, the result of NATO discussions last week, represents the most direct U.S. military action so far to help contain the Syrian conflict and minimize the risk it will spill across the border with Turkey, a NATO member that is housing more than 100,000 Syrian refugees and providing aid to the Syrian rebels trying to oust President Bashar Assad.

Tensions between Turkey and Syria have escalated in recent months as Syrian forces have bombed rebel positions along the border and occasionally lobbed artillery rounds into Turkish territory. The Turks also have grown increasingly alarmed that Assad’s forces could fire missiles into Turkey.

News of the Patriot deployment order came as antigovernment activists inside Syria reported fresh violence, including an unconfirmed rebel claim to have downed a government warplane attacking insurgent positions near the international airport in Damascus, the capital.

In Moscow, meanwhile, the Russian Foreign Ministry sought to distance itself from comments a day earlier by its Middle East envoy that the Syrian rebels may defeat Assad, a long-standing Kremlin ally and arms client. A ministry spokesman, Alexander Lukashevich, said Russia remained committed to a political solution in Syria.

“We have never changed our position and will not change it,” Lukashevich said.

He rejected a comment made by a State Department spokesman Thursday that Moscow had “woken up” and changed its position as dynamics shifted on the battlefield, saying “we have never been asleep.”

Lukashevich said Russia is not carrying out any discussions with the U.S. about Assad’s future, shooting down widespread speculation that Russia could help arrange the president’s safe passage out of Syria. He said he had restated Russia’s insistence on a negotiated solution “hundreds of times” in recent months.

On Thursday, Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov told the Public Chamber, a Kremlin advisory group, that it was “impossible to rule out a victory of the Syrian opposition,” in comments that were immediately made public by Russian wire services.

The statement appeared to signal a turn in the nearly 2-year-old conflict and was seen in the West as evidence that Assad was losing politically as well as militarily.

An earlier statement from the Foreign Ministry, which was published on its website Friday, said Bogdanov “has not given any announcements or special interviews to journalists in recent days,” suggesting that his comments were given informally and not meant for publication.

It also framed his comments about rebel gains differently, saying he was simply repeating — and not confirming — the rebels’ claims about military advances.

JANUARY GOAL SET

All six Patriot units deployed in Turkey will be under NATO’s command and are scheduled to be operational by the end of January, officials in Washington said.

George Little, the Pentagon spokesman, said Panetta signed the order as he flew from Afghanistan to this air base in southern Turkey, close to the Syrian border.

“The United States has been supporting Turkey in its efforts to defend itself,” Little said.

The order “will deploy some 400 U.S. personnel to Turkey to support two Patriot missile batteries,” Little added, and the personnel and Patriot batteries will arrive in Turkey “in coming weeks.” He did not specify their deployment locations.

After landing at Incirlik on Friday, Panetta announced his decision to deploy the Patriots at a gathering of U.S. Air Force personnel.

He said the United States was working with Turkey, Jordan and Israel to monitor Syria’s stockpiles of chemical weapons, and warned of “serious consequences” if Syria used them, but he did not offer any specifics.

“We have drawn up plans for presenting to the president,” Panetta said. “We have to be ready.”

Turkey’s worries about vulnerability to Syrian missiles, including Scuds that might be tipped with chemical weapons, were heightened recently by intelligence reports that Syrian troops had mixed small amounts of precursor chemicals for sarin, a deadly nerve gas, at one or two storage sites, and loaded them into artillery shells and airplane bombs.

“Their arsenal of chemical weapons has been configured for use at a moment’s notice,” Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., who heads the House Intelligence Committee, said in an interview Friday. Panetta, however, said this week that intelligence about chemical weapons activity in Syria had “leveled off.”

The recent Scud missile attacks by Assad’s forces against rebels in northern Syria have added to Turkey’s concerns. The Scud missiles were armed with conventional warheads, but the attacks showed that the Assad government is prepared to use missiles as it struggles to slow rebel gains.

Syria denied Thursday that it had fired Scuds this week. But NATO’s secretary-general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said the intelligence gathered by the alliance indicated they were Scud-type missiles.

NATO foreign ministers last week endorsed the decision to send Patriot batteries to Turkey. The details of how many each nation would send were not worked out until this week, officials said.

Meanwhile, European Union leaders agreed to look at all options to help Syria’s opposition remove the “illegitimate regime” of Assad.

“Inaction and indifference are not options,” British Prime Minister David Cameron told reporters after an EU summit in Brussels on Friday. “We’re saying all options, all options, should be considered in order to help the opposition and enable greater support to the protection of civilians. Nothing is off the table.” He refused to be drawn on possible military action.

With the Syrian conflict entering its second winter and many thousands of people struggling for food and warmth in cities ruined by protracted fighting, the humanitarian costs were mounting.

An activist in Syria’s central province of Homs, who identified himself as Abu Ourouba, said the town of Houla — where the United Nations confirmed in May that Syrian troops had killed more than 100 people, including at least 32 and possibly as many as 49 children — was facing a catastrophe.

“Houla has been besieged from all directions for the past 10 days. Until now, not even one loaf of bread has entered Houla. The food that was available is beginning to run out very quickly. Most children don’t have milk anymore. The kids are at risk of dying from hunger,” he said.

Shelling along access routes means no one can walk “unless they crawl” to avoid hundreds of strikes from tanks, warplanes and rocket launchers, the activist said.

HOSTAGE TRADE SOUGHT

When Syrian rebels stopped two buses of Lebanese travelers in the spring and took 11 passengers hostage, they set off a cascade of fallout: riots at the Beirut airport, retaliation kidnappings against Syrians in Lebanon and a deepening of the sectarian character of the war.

Since that day in May, the rebels have continued to detain most of their prisoners, having released two as a good will gesture. The rest, nine men who the captors insist are members of Hezbollah — which the prisoners deny — will be released only as part of a prisoner exchange, the rebel commander holding the group said.

The commander, Amar al-Dadikhi of the North Storm brigade, which has been holding the prisoners at an undisclosed location in Syria’s northern countryside, said in interviews that he would free the hostages if the Syrian government released two prominent opposition figures and if Lebanon freed all Syrian activists in government custody.

Information for this article was contributed by Eric Schmitt, Anne Barnard, Hania Mourtada, Hwaida Saad,Alan Cowell, Ellen Barry, Rick Gladstone and C.J. Chivers of The New York Times and by Thomas Penny, Gopal Ratnam, Gonzalo Vina, Gregory Viscusi and Caroline Alexander of Bloomberg News.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 12/15/2012

Upcoming Events