Russian Airliner Fired On In Syrian Airspace

Why would anybody assume it is Syrian Army/Air Force doing this? The only forces that have threatened to shoot down civilian airliners are the rebels.
That Russia is not impressed with the islamist rebels is not anything new…
They may not be married to Assad, backing non-violent alternatives to the Baath regime, but they have never been positively disposed to islamist rebels/terrorist forces in the middle east,
not the least because of their experience from afghanistan and current situation in central asia/southern russia, so this event would simply reinforce their position.

But I suppose this is par for course with reporting on Syria, where you get the reports of chemical weapons immediatley pinned on the regime,
even when there is only a handful of deaths of the regime’s own forces, i.e. NOT effective ‘WMD’s, and more in line with rebels using chemical weapons…
Which is entirely in-line with established behavior pattern of losing side in civil war trying to ‘play victim’ to draw in US/NATO forces,
similar things happened in Bosnia with cases of sides staging attacks on their own forces (if not consructing fact massacre sites) to establish a rationale for outside help.
And right after the most recent ‘chemical’ attack, you have tens if not more rebel battalions claiming chemical weapon attacks against themself/civilians… HMMM…
Like the cry wolf story, if one side’s PR is simply consistently shown to be lies, you just cant really assume it’s true anymore (unless you WANT to be deluded, of course…)

The response to the event seems silly, comentators doubting the ability of an airliner to avoid SAMs, inability of pilots to see missiles fired from behind, etc,
OF COURSE that is true, but if the missiles were fired from ahead of the flight path, that is how the pilots could have seen flashes as they reported,
and while the plane could not very well evade those missiles themselves, the normal reaction would be to raise flight level to avoid potential future shots,
and what has been reported doesn’t contradict that in any way, it was never claimed that the pilots were engaged in dog-fight maneuvers vs. missiles…

Russia should be less than impressed with their Best Friends behaviour….

Syria is in a civil war at the moment. It might as well have been the rebels taking a shot at something they saw flying over, not knowing if their target was military or civilian, Syrian or foreign.

Yes, I admit I was surprised.

Russia should be less than impressed with their Best Friends behaviour….