Turkey says it destroyed 'chemical warfare facility' in Syria

ISTANBUL: A Turkish official said Saturday that Turkey destroyed a chemical warfare facility in northwest Syria after dozens of its soldiers were killed by Syrian regime fire.

The Turkish army destroyed overnight "a chemical warfare facility, located some 13 kilometres south of Aleppo, along with a large number of other regime targets," the senior official told reporters on condition of anonymity.

The leaders of Russia and Turkey held crisis talks on Friday after 33 Turkish soldiers died in an airstrike in Syria, as Ankara ramped up pressure on Europe by threatening to flood in migrants.

The United States and United Nations urged an end to the Russian-backed Syrian offensive against opposition forces’ holdouts, but Turkey appeared intent on easing tensions with Moscow by pinning the blame squarely on President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.



The flare-up raised fresh concerns for civilians caught up in the escalation of the horrific eight-year civil war, with the UN saying nearly a million people – half of them children – have been displaced in the bitter cold by the fighting since December.

Thirty-three Turkish troops were killed late on Thursday in the air strike in the northwestern province of Idlib, in the biggest single loss of life by the Turkish military in years.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan spoke by telephone and looked to scale down tensions, with the Kremlin saying the two expressed “serious concern” about the situation.

“There is always room for dialogue,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said.

He said the two leaders spoke of “the necessity to do everything” to implement a 2018 ceasefire that has since collapsed between the two countries in Idlib.