Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has charged Republican People’s Party (CHP) of failing to show a “nationalist” position on the shooting down of a Turkish jet by Syria last month, charging the CHP of behaving like a voice for the Syrian Baath regime.
“Bashar al-Assad isn’t talking of our [shot down] jet as Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu is already speaking on his behalf. The CHP has evidently taken in charge of the function of voice for the Baath regime in Turkey. The CHP leader didn’t show a nationalistic position on our shot down jet,” Erdoğan told on Wednesday on his party’s expanded provincial chairmen meeting.
Erdoğan also criticised Kılıçdaroğlu for believing a report by The Wall Street Journal that declared that the Turkish jet had been shot down by Syrian forces in Syrian territorial waters. “You’ll, on the one hand, slander the Justice and Development Party AK Party by charging it of executing some foreign countries’ policies and, then again, you’ll sound loudly the untruthful statement of an American newspaper. What are you chasing after? Kılıçdaroğlu is motivating Turkey’s enemies,” Erdoğan carried on.
The prime minister also charged some Turkish media outlets of going with the Syrian regime as loyally as pro-regime news outlets in Syria do.
Syrian forces downed an RF-4E Phantom, an disarmed reconnaissance mission version of the F-4 fighter jet, on June 22, when, in accordance with Ankara, it was on a unaccompanied mission to test domestic radar systems. Turkey states the plane was hit in international airspace by Syria without word of advice in a “unfriendly act.”
Syria, on the other hand, says the plane was flying fast and low, at an height of a hundred meters, and that it was only a kilometer off the Syrian coast when it was downed. Syria also states the plane was hit by antiaircraft gun weapon system that only have a range of about two-and-a-half kilometers, rather than by a projectile.
The Wall Street Journal’s report, which quoted US and Pentagon officials, laid claim that the Turkish jet downed by Syrian forces on June 22 was shot down in Syrian air space and not in international air space, as the Turkish government asserts.
Erdoğan repeated in his speech that the Turkish aircraft was hit thirteen miles away the Syrian coast, a mile beyond the country’s national air space. The plane lost height and speed after it was hit and strayed into the Syrian airspace, crashing into the water 8.5 miles away the Syrian coast, he added.
Remarking on the disputation as to how the plane was downed, Erdoğan told it would become clear whether it was downed by a projectile or antiaircraft fire after the wreckage of the plane, found last week in the seabed, was completely retrieved and analysed.
