BEIRUT — Turkey warned Syria to keep its forces away from the countries’ troubled border or risk an armed response - a furious reply on Tuesday to last week’s downing of a Turkish military plane by the Damascus regime.
NATO backed up Turkey and condemned Syria for shooting down the plane but stopped short of threatening military action, reflecting its reluctance to involve itself in a conflict that could ignite a broader war.
Near the capital of Damascus, meanwhile, Syria’s elite Republican Guard forces battled rebels in some of the most intense fighting involving the special forces since the uprising against President Bashar Assad’s regime began in March 2011, according to activists.
Assad, in an address to his new Cabinet on Tuesday, appeared to acknowledge the seriousness of the situation in a statement broadcast on Syrian state TV in which he said his country is in a “genuine state of war.”
Until now, Assad has described the conflict as an uprising of terrorists who are carrying out a foreign agenda.
More than 14,000 people have been killed in the uprising. Despite global ire over the crackdown by the Assad regime, the international response has been focused entirely on diplomacy and sanctions, not intervention, as the violence escalates.
In a speech to the parliament, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Syria shot down the unarmed reconnaissance plane in international airspace without warning in a “deliberate” and “hostile” act.
“Any military element that approaches the Turkish border from Syria and poses a security risk and danger will be regarded as a threat and treated as a military target,” Erdogan said.
Border violations in the region are not uncommon, he said, and Syrian helicopters had violated Turkish airspace five times recently without a Turkish response. The two countries share a 566-mile frontier.
Erdogan cautioned Syria against testing his resolve.
“No one should be deceived by our cool-headed stance,” he said. “Our acting with common sense should not be perceived as a weakness.”
Turkey and Syria, which share strong historical and cultural ties, were both ruled for centuries by the Ottoman Empire until the empire collapsed and the modern Turkish Republic was founded almost 90 years ago. Before the Syrian revolt broke out in 2011, Erdogan had pursued a strong regional friendship with Assad.
Syrian officials insist the plane violated its airspace, saying a Syrian officer shot it down with anti-aircraft fire after spotting an unidentified jet flying at high speed and low altitude.
Turkey disputes that. Turkey says that although the RF-4E jet had unintentionally strayed into Syrian airspace, it was inside international airspace when it was brought down over the Mediterranean. Its two pilots are missing.
Erdogan has said Syrian forces also fired on a searchand-rescue plane Friday after the downing of the jet. It was not clear whether the second plane was hit.
The incident renewed fears of an escalation of the violence that could draw in neighboring countries. The Turks have launched preemptive attacks in the past, notably in 2007 and 2008 against Kurdish rebels in Iraq who used Iraqi territory to strike targets inside Turkey as part of their war for Kurdish self-rule.
The head of NATO called the downing of the jet unacceptable after Turkey briefed NATO’s North Atlantic Council about it. The talks were held under Article 4 of NATO’s founding treaty, which allows a member to request consultations if its security has been threatened.
Under the much stronger Article 5, an attack on one member is considered an attack on all NATO countries.
The meeting was the first time a country has invoked Article 4 in nearly a decade. In 2003, Turkey also invoked Article 4 when tensions escalated ahead of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said the alliance condemned the Syrian attack “in the strongest terms” and expressed solidarity with Turkey but he did not speak of any possible armed action against Syria.
“It’s my clear expectation that the situation won’t continue to escalate,” Rasmussen told reporters after the meeting. “What we have seen is a completely unacceptable act, and I would expect Syria to take all necessary steps to avoid such events in the future.”
The uprising against Assad has obliterated the once-close ties between Syria and Turkey. Turkey has repeatedly called for Assad to step down as 33,000 Syrians have sought refuge in Turkey from the violence.
Turkey also is hosting civilian opposition groups as well as members of the Free Syrian Army, which is fighting to bring down the Assad regime.
“We will continue to support the struggle of our Syrian brothers at all costs,” Erdogan said Tuesday, referring to the opponents of Assad. “We will continue to act in solidarity with our brothers until the Syrian people are freed of this cruel dictator.”
Rasmussen has repeatedly said NATO would need a clear international mandate and regional support before it embarked on a mission in Syria. Last year, NATO launched airstrikes on Libyan government targets only after receiving such a mandate from the U.N. Security Council, along with backing from the Arab League.
But Russia and China - both veto-wielding members of the Security Council - have stood by Assad and shielded his regime from international sanctions. Both countries are keen to avoid any type of military intervention in Syria, and they vow to veto any attempts.
Military intervention has been all but ruled out in Syria for now, in part because of the potential for escalation. Damascus has strong allegiances to powerful forces including Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Shiite powerhouse Iran.
Russia’s president and foreign minister repeated Tuesday that Iran should take part in a meeting on the Syrian crisis in Geneva, scheduled for Saturday.
“The more of Syria’s neighbors that are brought into this process the better,” President Vladimir Putin told Russian journalists traveling with him in Jordan. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said he will take part in the Geneva meeting even if Iran is not represented, but without Iran, “we will be talking about how then to gather all of the participants.”
SANA, Syria’s state news agency, quoted the Russian deputy foreign minister, Alexander Grushko, as saying that he hopes NATO will not take measures Tuesday “that would aggravate [the] situation in Syria” or prevent a political settlement.
A deputy to international envoy Kofi Annan told a closed Security Council meeting that the principles and guidelines for a Syrianled political transition must be agreed on before the Geneva meeting can happen, a diplomat said.
The diplomat said thatNasser Al-Kidwa, a deputy joint special envoy of the United Nations and the Arab League on Syria, told the council Tuesday that Annan believes the meeting he is trying to organize will only be worth holding if participants can agree on how a Syrian political transition should work and can’t simply be a “talking shop.”
As part of a U.N.-Arab League peace plan that failed to take hold in Syria, U.N. observers were sent to the country, but they suspended their work earlier this month after coming under fire. The U.N.’s peacekeeping chief, Herve Ladsous, told the Security Council on Tuesday that it is too dangerous for the observers to resume their mission, although it could restart at some point, according to a diplomat.
Syria’s military remains loyal to Assad despite some recent high-profile defections, and the opposition is fragmented and unable to attack as a unified force, according to U.S. intelligence officials who briefed reporters in Washington on the Syrian conflict.
The regime has maintained troop loyalty by keeping paychecks coming even as food and fuel run out for the rest of the country, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity to provide thesensitive information.
The officials say the opposition has learned effective guerrilla-like tactics but is still too disorganized to hold territory, which will likely produce a continuing “seesaw” battle between the two sides.
In Lebanon, meanwhile, gunmen erected roadblocks, burned tires and fired into the air in downtown Beirut in the pre-dawn hours Tuesday, and in the suburb of Jounieh to the east, at least two land mines were found on the grounds of a hospital.
The roadblocks were manned by Shiites who apparently support Syria’s president and who were angry over the arrest of a Shiite man for firebombing and shooting into the offices of New TV, a Lebanon broadcaster that has been critical of the Syrian government. The incidents aroused renewed concern that Lebanon’s sectarian factions would once again be dragged into the conflicts of its neighbor.
Information for this article was contributed by Elizabeth A. Kennedy, Slobodan Lekic, Selcan Hacaoglu, Suzan Fraser, Lynn Berry, John Heilprin, Kimberly Dozier and Ron DePasquale of The Associated Press; and by Sebnem Arsu, Alan Cowell, Paul Geitner, Rod Nordland, Dalal Mawad and Hwaida Saad of The New York Times.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 06/27/2012