The United States on Thursday shot down an armed Turkish drone that was operating near its troops in Syria, the Pentagon said, the first time Washington has brought down an aircraft of NATO ally Turkey.
A Turkish defense ministry official said the drone that was shot down did not belong to the Turkish armed forces, but did not say whose property it was.
President’s Take: Hot Spots Near and Far
The year 2023 has seen peace and security challenges both far from the EU’s borders and closer to home. The latter, especially, have heightened in recent weeks and months, which have seen fighting in the South Caucasus and Kosovo, even as a second year of war in Ukraine stretches on. While the three crises are very different in nature, all suggest a worrying inclination on the part of some governments to seek solutions to disputes through force of arms. Insofar as this jarring trend involves a proliferation of new wars, large and small, it flies in the face of the decades of energy that the EU has invested in turning the page on past conflagrations in Europe and its neighbourhood. Crisis Group is working on a report about how these conflicts are shaping the emerging European security architecture and how best to minimise the risk of future clashes. In the meantime, however, these three crises demand immediate attention. We have explored all of them in earlier work, but I want to share a few thoughts about recent developments.
On 9 June 2023, a boat carrying approximately 750 migrating men, women, and children, left the shores of the city of Tobruk in Eastern Libya, heading to Italy. Most of those on board were Syrians, Egyptians, Pakistanis, and Palestinians. Their voyage and dream of reaching the shores of safety ended tragically on the morning of 14 June, when their boat sank 80 kilometres off the coast of Pylos, Greece.
Summary:
Syria’s northwest has been progressively transformed into a de facto canton outside the control of the Syrian state. This is the outcome of a dynamic process that began in 2016 and that mainly reflected the security interests of Türkiye, Russia, Iran, and the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. This framework, which has been an alternative form of conflict management, has allowed these actors to systematically adjust the canton’s characteristics, a painful process that is ongoing.
The Pandora Papers exposed the financial secrets of powerful people in more than 100 countries, leading to a worldwide crackdown on tax dodgers, money launderers and the white-collar professionals who enable them.
Turkey continued to bomb infrastructure in Syria’s Kurdish-controlled region after a US F-16 shot down a drone that encroached within half a kilometer of a US base.
Turkish drones conducted multiple strikes within a kilometer of a US base in northeast Syria on Thursday, causing US troops to take shelter in bunkers in the hours before an American commander ordered one of the unmanned aircraft to be shot down, the Pentagon said.
The US readout of a call between the top US and Turkish diplomats stressed the two countries share a common objective of defeating terror.
Turkey expanded its air campaign against Kurdish autonomous zones in Syria and Iraq on Friday, even as senior Biden administration officials held calls with their counterparts in Ankara to discuss deconfliction and counter-terrorism mechanisms.
“Time will tell if that develops, and if it does, the counter-ISIS campaign will come under considerably more pressure than it is today,” one expert tells Al Arabiya English.
The US military said Friday that it had the right to self-defense any time it’s faced with threats and cautioned against distracting from the fight against ISIS after a Turkish drone came within close distance to its troops in Syria.
Mali’s northern Tuareg rebels said on Wednesday that they had seized another military base from the Malian army, bringing to five the number of conquered and pillaged camps in recent weeks.
Four Lebanese and Cypriot NGOs released a joint letter on Friday, 11 August, calling Cyprus to stop its pushbacks of asylum-seekers back to Lebanon, where they are unlawfully deported back to Syria.
The letter said that Cypriot authorities had forcibly returned at least 109 individuals from Cyprus to Lebanon since July, of which at least 73 “were subsequently deported to Syria and handed over to the Syrian regime.”