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Turkey deployed swarms of killer drones to strike Russian-backed Syrian government forces, in what a senior official said was a military innovation that demonstrated Ankara’s technological prowess on the battlefield.

The retaliation for the killing last week of 33 Turkish soldiers by Syrian forces involved an unprecedented number of drones in coordinated action, said the senior official in Turkey with direct knowledge of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Syria policy. It was the first time a country had commanded the air space over such a large area using drone swarms, according to the official.

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The series of strikes since Thursday by dozens of the remotely-controlled aircraft targeted Syrian bases and chemical warfare depots, the Turkish military said. But Turkey also located and destroyed some Syrian missile-defence systems, raising questions about the effectiveness of the Russian-made equipment intended to deter such air attacks.

“That’s something only Israel had been recorded publicly to have done until now,” Charles Lister, director of the Extremism and Counterterrorism Program at the Middle East Institute, said on Twitter, in reference to video footage taken by a Turkish drone allegedly showing the destruction of a Syrian army air-defence system. Turkey was waging an “air campaign run entirely by armed drones backed up” by heavy rocket artillery, he said.