Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani acknowledged on Wednesday that Turkish military officers had visited the airbase in Syria that Israel bombed this week, but denied that there were plans for a Turkish military deployment.
The visit by Turkish officers to the Abu Duhur airbase was nothing more than a facet of “ongoing military cooperation” between allies, al-Shaibani insisted in an interview with Axios.
His remarks were published by the news outlet hours after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asserted that Israel had warned Turkey against any military activity in Syria before launching the strikes on the airbase on Tuesday.
Israel said it targeted the airbase because Syria “was on the verge of breaching” an agreed-upon status quo in security matters “by permitting Turkish troops to deploy” there.
But al-Shaibani told Axios that “there was no Turkish military build-up at the base in any sense that would justify such an interpretation,” and said Damascus had told Jerusalem as much in the days before the attack.
