Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim in a televised address on Saturday disclosed that two Turkish soldiers have died after their helicopter was shot down during Ankara's military operation against Syrian Kurdish fighters in northern Syria. According to Al Jazeera, the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had earlier said an army helicopter had been "shot down" near the southern Hatay province. He stated that the ATAK aircraft crashed at around 1pm local time (10:00 GMT).
According to him;
"These things will happen, we are in a war ... We might lose a helicopter, but they'll pay the price for this"
Meanwhile, Mustafa Bali, a spokesman for the Kurdish YPG armed group, told the AP news agency that his fighters downed the helicopter in Raju, northwest of the Syrian city of Afrin. Turkey opened a new front in the multisided Syrian civil war, when it launched an air and ground offensive against YPG fighters on its southern border with Syria last month.
The YPG - trained, armed and supported by the US to fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) - control a swath of land in northern Syria. Turkey considers the YPG as an extension of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has fought a bloody, decades-long armed campaign.
Al Jazeera's Jamal Elshayyal, reporting from Gaziantep on the Turkey-Syria border, said the conflict was "escalating day by day". More than 20 Turkish soldiers and 150 YPG fighters have been killed since the military offensive began, he said. Seven Turkish civilians have also lost their lives.
