• Turkey to lead the way in cooperation after Turkish Defence Minister releases statement.
• Israeli airstrikes could be a thing of the past if new Syrian army to be given air defence training.
Turkey has offered military training to Syria if the new Syrian administration requests it the Turkish Defence Minister Yasar Guler said.
After being the first country to reopen their embassy after the toppling of deposed dictator Bashar Al Assad, to being the first country to send their foreign minister to Syria, Turkey has led the way in cooperation, recognition and stability in Syria with now having a unique opportunity to influence the nation from investing in transport, infrastructure, in raw resources, trade to now being able to potentially train Syrian administratively controlled troops.
There were multiple military armour abandoned by the Assad regime during the rebel offensive, including tanks, armoured vehicles but also air defence systems.
The new Syrian administration led by Ahmad Sharaa likely has a vacuum of expertise when it comes to handling and using these complex defensive hardware unlike it’s neighbour Turkey, a NATO country with the second largest army in NATO one that was deemed to have had a diverse enough military to fight off a Russian invasion before the Russian paper tiger exposure in Ukraine in 2022.
A complex network of air defence systems, a protection against Israel?
In a ceremony in Ankara late October, about a month before the rebel offensive in Syria, Turkish president Recep Tayeb Erdogan said: “It is understood much better now how vitally important our multi-layered air defence systems are for our security.
“If they (Israel) have an ‘Iron Dome’, we will have a ‘Steel Dome’. We won’t look at them and say ‘why don’t we have this’,”.
It must also be noted that Turkey had acquired acquired the infamous S-400 air defence system in 2020 from Russia, a system still considered the most effective air defence system in the world even according to the US.
For Turkey to train the new Syrian administration as well as potentially invest in them could potentially mean the new Syrian administration is taught how to use the air defence systems left over by the Bashar regime while also having acquired more complex and effective systems. If Turkey decides to expand it’s multi layered air defence system to Syria as a favour, it could create a extremely powerful steel dome over Syria. All options could spell bad news for Israel who may loose the capability to strike Syria in the same way they struck Lebanon and Gaza, both of which had no effective air defence system. This may have been a reason for the erratic behaviour by Israel after the regime fell by striking military facilities with deserted aircraft, because the Israelis may feel it was the only opportunity to truly weaken their neighbour before the country got back on it’s heels.
