Syrian Fighter Jet Reportedly Defects To Jordan During Training Exercise

by News Agencies and Israel Hayom Staff

A Syrian MiG 21 fighter jet lands in Jordan on Thursday in what Syrian opposition activists say is the first defection involving an aircraft since the start of the 15-month-old uprising against President Bashar al-Assad.

A Syrian MiG 21 fighter jet landed in Jordan on Thursday in what Syrian opposition activists said was the first defection involving an aircraft since the start of the 15-month-old uprising against President Bashar al-Assad.

"The plane landed at King Hussein Airbase at 11 a.m.," a Jordanian security source told Reuters, referring to a military airport 80 kilometers (50 miles) northeast of the capital Amman. Officials in Amman also told the BBC that the pilot had asked for political asylum.

Syrian state television said communication was lost with a plane of the same model, piloted by Col. Hassan Mirei al-Hamadeh, at 10:34 a.m. while it was on a training mission near the southern border with Jordan.

Since the start of the uprising against Assad's regime in March last year, Syrian troops have refrained from using military warplanes against rebels.

Meanwhile, according to a New York Times report on Thursday, a number of CIA agents were operating in southern Turkey to help smuggle Turkish weapons across the border to Syrian rebel forces. The CIA agents, according to the report, were there to prevent arms from reaching global Jihadi forces also operating in Syria, such as al-Qaida.

The Syrian army continued its shelling of central districts in the city of Homs on Thursday, residents said, after rebels and forces loyal to Assad agreed to a temporary truce to allow aid access to the sick and wounded.

Teams from the International Committee of the Red Cross and its partner, the Syrian Red Crescent, were on standby. Heavy fighting over the past 10 days has left hundreds of civilians stuck in the old city of Homs, unable to leave the battlefield, the ICRC said on Wednesday.

Waleed Faris, a resident of one of the neighborhoods the ICRC was trying to enter, said shelling was heaviest at dawn on Thursday, but there were signs the violence might be subsiding.

"Early this morning there was heavy shelling. Now I can hear one or two mortars fall every half an hour. It is quiet today compared to the past few days," he said, adding that two people had died in his neighborhood of Khalidiya on Thursday.

Rabab al-Rifai, a spokeswoman for the ICRC in Damascus, said a small ICRC team had left the capital on Wednesday for Homs and had joined dozens of Syrian Arab Red Crescent volunteers in the city.

"We got the okay from the authorities and opposition groups also gave us assurances that they would respect the pause (in fighting)," al-Rifai told Reuters by telephone.

News Agencies and Israel Hayom Staff

Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=4781

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