The Russians are all up in arms, saying “Turkey has shown its hand” and “Turkey is too aggressive”.  To which I can respond without hesitance, Russia overplayed its hand by not respecting Turkey’s sovereignty and encroached on Turkey’s airspace once too often and got shot down.  Most world leaders would apologize, meet in private, shake hands and agree to not have a fist fight in public.  But petulant Putin will play the role of the alpha-male, and suspend commercial air traffic into Turkey until he realizes he is denying Russians another vacation spot. Russia will surely engage in a covert operation against Turkey. An esteemed colleague suggested the Tomb of Suleyman Shah, which is right on the Turkish border.

https://youtu.be/IschF-ihjS0

The same day that Turkish forces shot down a Russian jet for allegedly violating Turkey’s airspace, Syrian rebels affiliated with the Free Syrian Army published a video purporting to show their fighters blowing up a stationary Russian-made helicopter on YouTube.

The video shows Syrian rebels launching what arms analyst Elliot Higgins, who runs Bellingcat, a website for open-source analysis, identified on Twitter as a U.S.-made TOW (tube-launched, optically-tracked, wire-guided) missile at a helicopter sitting exposed in a field some distance away.

The First Coastal Division, the group that uploaded the video, said it destroyed the helicopter after forcing it to land with an earlier missile strike, according to Reuters. And the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a watchdog group monitoring the conflict in Syria, told Reuters that at least 10 passengers evacuated from the helicopter after it landed, escaping the second missile strike that ultimately destroyed it. It’s not clear whether the crew was Russian or Syrian.

Russian military officials have confirmed that two of its Mi-8 helicopters were dispatched on a search and rescue mission for the pilots who parachuted from the Russian jet downed earlier on Tuesday, and that rebels destroyed one of the two helicopters. “During the operation, as a result of small-arms fire, one of the helicopters was damaged, and forced to make a landing on neutral territory,” Lieutenant-General Sergei Rudskoi toldreporters on Tuesday.

One Russian soldier died in the incident, and “the downed helicopter was destroyed by mortar fire from territory controlled by armed gangs” Rudskoi said. It hasn’t been confirmed whether the video below depicts the helicopter referenced by Rudskoi or if it’s of a separate incident