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He added, however, that he might have been “happy” if the doomed jet had been Israeli.
“We learned that it (the aircraft) belonged to Turkey after shooting it down. I say 100 percent ‘if only we had not shot it down’,” the Cumhuriyet newspaper quoted Assad as saying in an interview published yesterday.
His comments emerged as fighting raged throughout Syria to unseat Assad in what is increasingly taking on the character of an all-out civil war, fuelled by sectarian hatred.
Syrian helicopters bombarded a Damascus suburb on Monday and Turkey scrambled warplanes near the border in the north, as the UN human rights chief warned that arms supplies to both the government and rebels were deepening the 16-month conflict.
Asked whether the tensions between Syria and Turkey could lead to war, Assad said: “We will not allow (the tensions) to turn into open combat between the two countries, which would harm them both.”
He also said Syria had not amassed and would not amass military forces along the Turkish border, whatever action Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s government takes.
The paper did not specify when the interview was held, but in it Assad refers to an international meeting held in Geneva on Saturday under the auspices of peace envoy Kofi Annan.
Turkey has heightened military activity along its southern border since Syria shot down the Turkish jet over the Mediterranean on 22 June, prompting a sharp rebuke from Ankara which said it would respond “decisively”.
Syria says it shot down the Turkish jet in self-defence and that it was brought down in Syrian air space. Turkey says the jet accidentally violated Syrian air space for a few minutes but was brought down in international air space.
Assad said Syria would not shy away from apologising if it emerged that the aircraft was shot down in international airspace.
“The plane was using a corridor which Israeli planes have used three times before. Soldiers shot it down because we did not see it on our radar and because information was not given.”
“Of course I might have been happy if this had been an Israeli plane,” Assad said.
Meanwhile, an AFP report stated yesterday that dozens of Syrian soldiers including top officers defected to Turkey on Monday, citing the Anatolia news agency.
The 85 soldiers who fled include one general and other senior officials, the agency said, citing local officials.
The latest defections bring to 14 the number of Syrian generals to have crossed into Turkey, abandoning the Assad regime.
The latest group of soldiers crossed into Turkey at Reyhanli, in the south of the country. They were part of a group of 293 people including many women and children.
Turkey is already sheltering more than 35 000 Syria refugees including many deserters from the country’s military.
l A new report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) said that Syrian intelligence agencies are running torture centres across the country where detainees are beaten with batons and cables, burned with acid, sexually assaulted, and their fingernails torn out.
The report released yesterday by the New York-based group identified 27 detention centres that it says intelligence agencies have been using since President Bashar al-Assad’s government began a crackdown on an uprising that began in March 2011.
HRW conducted more than 200 interviews with people who said they were tortured, including a 31-year-old man who was detained in the Idlib area in June and made to undress.
“Then they started squeezing my fingers with pliers. They put staples in my fingers, chest and ears. I was only allowed to take them out if I spoke. The staples in the ears were the most painful,” the man told HRW.
“They used two wires hooked up to a car battery to give me electric shocks. They used electric stun-guns on my genitals twice. I thought I would never see my family again. They tortured me like this three times over three days,” he said.
The report found that tens of thousands of people had been detained by the country’s four main intelligence agencies: Department of Military Intelligence, the Political Security Directorate, the General Intelligence Directorate, and the Air Force Intelligence Directorate.
“Each of these four agencies maintains central branches in Damascus as well as regional, city, and local branches across the country. In virtually all of these branches there are detention facilities of varying size,” HRW said.
The group documented more than 20 torture methods that “clearly point to a state policy of torture and ill-treatment and therefore constitute a crime against humanity”.
The group called for the UN Security Council to refer the issue of Syria to the International Criminal Court and to adopt targeted sanctions against officials carrying out abuse.
A ceasefire in Syria is vital if there is to be a political transition, a spokesperson for peace envoy Kofi Annan said yesterday.
“It’s imperative that we get a ceasefire,” said Ahmad Fawzi, adding that exiting the Syria crisis will not be easy.
“It’s going to be a long, bumpy road, but we believe that commitments made in Geneva were genuine and if applied as promised will have an effect.” — Al Jazeera/AP.
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