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Turkish military helicopter shot down in Syria operation - Erdogan Turkish military helicopter shot down in Syria operation - Erdogan
(35 minutes later)
A Turkish military helicopter was shot down during Operation Olive Branch (conducted in northern Syria), President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said, as cited by Anadolu agency.
“A little earlier, one of our helicopters was shot down,” Erdogan said in a televised address on Saturday. The helicopter is reported to have crashed in the Turkish Hatay Province on the border with Syria’s Afrin region where Ankara is conducting a military campaign against Kurdish forces.
“They will pay the price for this,” Erdogan said, without specifying who exactly was responsible for the downing of the aircraft.
The Turkish Operation Olive Branch in the Afrin region in northern Syria entered its fourth week on Saturday. The campaign followed Ankara’s promises to “strangle” the new Border Security Force (BSF) in Syria.
Earlier in January, the US-led coalition announced that it would help create the 30,000-strong BSF, half of which would be made up of the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) alliance.
Ankara was angered by the fact that the main force behind the SDF is the Kurdish People’s Protection units (YPG), linked to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The latter is designated as a terrorist group by Turkey.
Erdogan has recently stated that once the Afrin operation is over, Turkey’s next target could be Idlib.
“We want our Syrian brothers and sisters to return to their land, and now we want to do the same in Idlib what we have done in Afrin,” he said on Thursday.
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