On Sunday, Turkish forces shot down two Syrian warplanes in northwestern Syria, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, while the official Damascus media confirmed the safety of the pilots.
This comes shortly after the Syrian army shot down a Turkish march plane, after Damascus announced the closure of its airspace in the northwest of the country and its threat to shoot down any plane that violates the airspace of Idlib governorate.
"The Turkish terrorist forces target two Syrian planes in the Idlib area, and the pilots are parachuting and they are fine," the official Syrian News Agency (SANA) reported.
For its part, the Turkish Ministry of Defense announced that "two Sukhoi-24 planes were targeting our planes, which were shot down", without directly assuming responsibility for bringing them down, noting that "an anti-air weapon was destroyed, one of our drones was destroyed, as well as two anti-aircraft systems."
The Syrian Observatory and a spokesman for Syrian opposition factions backed by Turkey confirmed that two "Sukhoi" planes belonging to the Syrian government forces had been "shot down".
The Syrian Observatory reported that the two planes were targeted by "missiles that are likely to be air-to-air by Turkish F-16s," indicating that they had fallen in the areas of regime forces control.
Before the downing of the two Syrian planes, SANA announced that units of the army "shot down a drone of the Turkish regime during its operations against terrorist organizations on the axis of Saraqib in the southeastern Idlib countryside," which was confirmed by the Syrian Observatory.
This came after a Syrian military source confirmed that "the General Command of the army and the armed forces announces the closure of the airspace for plane flights over the northwestern region of Syria, especially over the Idlib governorate."
The source stressed that "any flight that violates our airspace will be treated as a hostile flight that must be shot down and prevented from achieving its aggressive goals."
The announcement by the Syrian army to close its airspace comes the day after 26 of its soldiers were killed by Turkish drones targeting several military sites in Idlib and Aleppo countryside, according to the Syrian Observatory.
The death toll of the Syrian government forces as a result of the Turkish bombing using drones or artillery since Friday was 74, according to the observatory, which also indicated the killing of ten members of the Lebanese Hezbollah. There was no official Syrian comment on the outcome.
With the support of Russia, Syrian regime forces have launched a large-scale attack since December against areas controlled by the Headquarters for the Liberation of Al-Sham (formerly Al-Nusra) and other opposition factions, and Turkish forces are deployed in and around Idlib governorate. The Syrian forces were able to make significant progress on the ground.
