Turkey safeguards key sites, feeling threatened in region by hostile state(s)

Turkey safeguards key sites, feeling threatened in region by hostile state(s), This is not an anti-terror program.(HD).

Increasing instability in its volatile region and prospects of tensions and conflict have urged Ankara to rethink its defense against precision strike attacks from mostly state actors.

Security officials said most of Turkey’s “sensitive sites” could no longer be defended without new, sophisticated systems.

“We have too many such sites and practically no defense against precision strikes,” one official said. “We are moving ahead to correct the situation.” the program involved sophisticated protection against “guided weapons.” 

Officials say “sensitive sites” may include present and future bridges on the Bosphorus, selected military and air bases and command centers, and future nuclear energy plants and some dams.

“This is not an anti-terror program. Here the defined threat is sophisticated missile technology, which can only come from hostile states,” one official explained.

The program intends to provide protection for existing and future pipelines especially in Turkey’s southeast. The project comes at a time when oil revenues are a lifeline for the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq, whose peshmerga forces are being supported by U.S. air strikes in their battle against the radical Sunni militants of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

A pipeline, which first began operating at the start of this year, allows the semi-autonomous Kurdish enclave to independently pump and export oil, carrying northern Iraqi Taq Taq crude to Turkey’s Mediterranean export outlet of Ceyhan.

But Turkey also hopes it will be destined to evolve into a more robust economic and political power with gas from the Caspian Sea set to move from the Southern Caucasus to Europe through Turkish territory.Hmmm.....Almost sound like Iran, who's the 'hostile state'? Israel? What you have here is a dictator peparing from all sides for a coming war, time to wake up and smell the coffee.Read the full story here.