Was shoot down of Syrian plane linked to Turkish elections?
Is it possible to disentangle the shooting down of a Syrian plane on March 23 from the Turkish local elections on March 30?
If I had begun this article by saying, "The shooting down of a Syrian MiG-23 warplane that allegedly violated Turkish airspace at 1:14 p,m. March 23, with a missile fired from a Turkish F-16 has suddenly shifted the attention of Turkish public opinion to the Syria border,” it would have been an incomplete lead.
The first sentence of any news analysis about the Syrian plane shot down March 23 cannot be complete unless it notes that the plane was shot down one week before the March 30 local elections.
On March 24, as this article was being written, Ankara authorities had not yet released sufficient or persuasive information to the public that the Syrian plane was posing a direct and critical security threat that needed to be eliminated.
The Turkish chief of the general staff, in a statement issued at 4 p.m. March 23, said the Syrian plane violated Turkish airspace by about one kilometer (six-tenths of a mile) at 1:12 p.m. local time in the area of the Camli border outpost in the Hatay/Yayladagi area, then turned west and flew about 1.5 kilometers (close to a mile) in Turkish airspace.
