1535 GMT: Syria. The Turkish news agency Today's Zaman has a significant claim. Citing another Turkish source, Zaman (which is highly reliable) reports that the Turkish government has ordered the Syrian military to stay at least 10 kilometers away from the border with Turkey, and to avoid firing artillery into that area.

Turkey's ntvmsnbc.com news portal claimed, citing “reliable sources,” that the Syrian regime had ordered all kinds of military aircraft, including warplanes and helicopters, to stay at least 10 kilometers from the Turkish border. The report also said a number of Syrian warplanes which approached within 10 kilometers of the Turkish border despite this warning had been ordered to turn back immediately by Syrian authorities.

This immediately caught our attention, because of a story we covered yesterday. We confirmed that the Turkish government used long-range howitzers capable of hitting targets 40km away, and we also confirmed that positions in Idlib were hit - far more strategicly important to the opposition than al Raqqah, where the cross-border incident took place. But the most important detail was the claim (made by the highly-disreputable-but-occasionally-correct Debka.com) was that the Turks had hit many areas within 10 kilometers of the Turkish border and were specifically targeting artillery bases fairly deep into Syrian territory and fairly far from the Acakale/Tal Abyad region.

In the same Zaman report, we see the first indications from Turkey that Wendesday and Thursday's artillery strikes did damage to Syrian military targets:

According to ntvmsnbc's report, Syria had ascertained that the Turkish artillery fire had killed 10 Syrian soldiers and damaged three tanks and two armored vehicles.

If all this is true, Turkey may have just granted the Syrian opposition the buffer zone that they so crave, as well as access to the entire Syrian border, greatly complicating Assad's efforts to shut down FSA supply routes to the north.

This claim is still unverified, and even if it is true it's not clear that the Assad regime will permanently abandon the strip 10 kilometers south of its border.

[link to www.enduringamerica.com]