Turkey warns Syria they will not shy away from war

Turkey's prime minister said on Friday his country did not want war but warned Syria not to make a "fatal mistake" by testing its resolve, and its army retaliated for a third day running after more mortar rounds from Syria landed on its soil.

In a belligerent speech to a crowd in Istanbul, Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan warned Syrian President Bashar al-Assad that Turkey would not shy away from war if provoked.

The speech followed a Syrian mortar barrage on a town in southeast Turkey that killed five people on Wednesday.

Turkish artillery bombarded Syrian military targets on Wednesday and Thursday in response, killing several Syrian soldiers, and the Turkish parliament authorized cross-border military action in the event of further aggression.

"We are not interested in war, but we're not far from war either. This nation has come to where it is today having gone through intercontinental wars," Erdogan said in his speech.

"Those who attempt to test Turkey's deterrence, its decisiveness, its capacity, I say here they are making a fatal mistake."

At least two mortar bombs fired from Syria landed in farmland in Turkey's southern Hatay province on Friday, one of them around 50 meters into Turkish territory, and a military unit responded immediately, Hatay Governor Celalettin Lekesiz was quoted as saying by the state-run Anatolian news agency.

A government official told Reuters there had been similar incidents over the past ten days due to intensifying skirmishes on the Syrian side of the border, and that the Turkish army had been responding in kind. But he said Wednesday's fatal strike on the town of Akcakale had been of a different magnitude.

"If there was gunfire, we returned the gunfire, if there was a shell we returned two or three shells, to warn them and deter them. Until Akcakale we were not very concerned that they were deliberate," the official said, asking not to be identified.

"Wednesday was different. There were five or six rounds into the same place. That's why we responded a couple of times, to warn and deter. To tell the (Syrian) military to leave. We think they've got the message and have pulled back from the area."

Turkish broadcaster NTV said Syria had given the order for its warplanes and helicopters not to enter an area within 10 km (six miles) of the Turkish border and had ordered its artillery units not to fire shells in areas close to the border.

There was no confirmation of this from the Syrian authorities.

At the United Nations, the Security Council condemned the original Syrian attack and demanded that such violations of international law stop immediately.

The United States has said it stands by its NATO ally's right to defend itself against aggression spilling over from Syria's war. Russia, a staunch ally of Syria, appealed to Turkey to stay calm and avoid any action that could increase tensions.

Russia said on Thursday it had received assurances from Damascus that the strike on Turkey had been a tragic accident but Erdogan dismissed it, saying this was the eighth time Syrian mortar rounds had hit Turkish ground.