The footage was followed by a statement from the Syrian army on Saturday that any violation of the Syrian airspace would be dealt with as an external military aggression.

Any aircraft violates the Syrian airspace will be dealt with as a hostile military target, pursued at the moment of its discovery and crushed once it penetrates Syrian airspace, SANA quoted a military source as saying.

Turkish defence ministry on Thursday had announced that two soldiers had died in an airstrike of unspecified origin in Syria’s rebel-held Idlib province, while another five soldiers had been wounded.

The images SANA shared appear to show four M60 Saber MBT type tanks being targeted.

“Moscow has served up footage from yesterday’s airstrike on our tanks through Assad’s official news agency,” security expert Metin Gurcan said in a tweet. “The strikes are from laser guided smart ammunition. It was Russian jets that carried out the strike. That is clear.”

Fifteen Turkish soldiers have died in Idlib since the beginning of February, and Turkey has announced its forces killing more than 150 regime soldiers in retaliation.

“In this process in case of even a minor harm on our soldiers in observation posts or elsewhere, I declare here that we will strike regime forces everywhere without limiting us to the Sochi agreement over Idlib,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said last week.

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