 We seem to be entering into a much more dangerous phase in what is happening in Syria today. The shooting down of the Syrian fighter plane by the US Air Force or US forces is a dangerous escalation of the war scenario over there. The US really has no local standard. This is Syrian territory, whatever operations Syria is doing, it is within its legal right to do so. The more dangerous part of it is that we know that the Russian forces are there in support of the Syrian forces. Therefore, this is a dangerous escalation because now Russia has said that if you continue to do behave like this, we have the right to treat every aircraft in Syrian airspace, in this airspace as enemy and therefore the right to shoot it down because the Syrian government has given them the right to fight along with them. This is on the first time they are doing this in Syria. Recently also they have done it in near what is called Al-Tanaf on the Damascus-Baghdadi highway. They have tried to stop Syrian forces for advancing in the southwest linking up with Iraq's forces, which are also coming from the other side and they have been trying to avoid or prevent such a link up. The question is why is the United States doing it and I think for that we need to understand the way the Syrian war is now shaping up. Now it's always been considered a proxy war, some have called it a civil war, getting outside of those frames. Only after the Aleppo sector was more or less solved, the Syrian government forces took over completely Aleppo and the retreat of al-Qaeda, ISIS or different kinds of forces into Idlib from Aleppo means that essentially now the battle is turning towards the southwest and here there are two major centers, two major cities, one is Raqqa which is the capital of the ISIS and the other is Derasaur which has been under siege for almost three years now and is under siege by ISIS and it is still under the control of the Syrian government. Now if you look at the southwest of Syria you will see it's really large amounts of desert. So what you do have here is a few towns or villages dotting essentially large expanse of land which has very very few habitations. So here are the area is large but the population is low, so what is the battle about? The battle is really about who controls this towns, if you control the towns then you control the entire expanse and this is also the place Syria has some oil and gas. So it's valuable in terms of economics of the Syrian government, they are essentially sending forces, the Syrian army is sending forces to essentially lift the siege of Derasaur and that's the battle that is shaping up for Syrian Arab army, Syrian army is really that's its interest. It had two axes in which it was sending forces, the northern one which was going below Raqqa, so it was to the south of Raqqa and then going towards Derasaur, other is from the south and that was again going towards Derasaur. So Al-Tanaf is the first battle they had with the Americans who tried to stop this advance by essentially attacking the Syrian army and now the northern advance, the northern axis has been also attacked because this is where they were trying to advance towards Derasaur from north and this is the column which has been attacked, the aircraft which has been brought down was in support of these activities. The Americans have said that this was being done because they were too close to the forces they are supporting which is the Syrian democratic front which is essentially Kurdish backed and the Kurds are the one who are now marching towards Raqqa, it's to the north therefore it's closer to the Kurdish territories which are being held, so they were advancing towards it but the town that around which this incident seems to have taken place had already been captured by the Syrian army and it doesn't appear that it was in control of the Kurdish forces but it seems to be it was under the control of the ISIS. So the argument that this was being done in support of the Syrian democratic front doesn't seem to be correct, what it appears is that the Americans do not want the northern axis which goes towards Derasaur to succeed because they would like that the Kurds take Raqqa and then take over as much of the southwest of Syria that they can. So this is in fact a part of the larger American strategy of trying to separate the southwest, the entire western part of Syria from the government forces. The other argument which is also I think an interesting one is that Israel does not want Iraq and Syria to link up, if Iraq and Syria links up then the supply line from Iran to Iraq from Iraq to Syria and from Syria to Hezbollah 11 on it become easier.