Khalil Hamra/Associated Press
A Syrian family sought refuge in the village of Atma, near the Turkish border with Syria.
ANTAKYA, Turkey — Turkey raised publicly for the first time on Wednesday the idea of stationing Patriot missile batteries along its southern border with Syria. The move would effectively create a no-fly zone that could help safeguard refugees and give rebel fighters a portion of Syrian territory without fear of crippling airstrikes by Syrian forces.
In comments reported in the local news media here, the Turkish foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, indicated that Turkey, a member of NATO, planned to request Patriot missiles from the alliance that would provide a defensive shield from incoming munitions from Syria. But the Turkish daily newspaper Milliyet reported that Turkey had agreed with the United States on a plan to use the missiles in an offensive capacity to create safe zones in Syria.
In the weeks before the presidential election, a plan for limited no-fly zones in Syria circulated in Washington policy circles and won advocates in the State Department, a person briefed on the matter said. According to this plan, safe zones would be enforced by Patriot missile batteries under NATO authority and positioned in Turkey and Jordan.
The plan, according to this person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the discussions were confidential, was presented in recent weeks to Turkey's leaders as a possible option, although the Obama administration has not signed off on it.
At a briefing in Washington, the State Department's spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, said that Turkey's request for the missiles was unrelated to establishing safe zones. "On the no-fly zone itself, you know that we've been saying for quite a while we continue to study whether that makes sense, how it might work," she said.
In Syria on Wednesday, insurgents escalated attacks on targets within earshot of President Bashar al-Assad's hilltop Damascus palace, killing a prominent judge with a car bomb and lobbing mortar shells at a neighborhood that houses central government offices and a military airfield. The assassination of the judge, reported by the official news agency, SANA, was the second high-profile killing of a top Assad loyalist in the Syrian capital in two days and added to the impression of an intensifying insurgency in the 20-month-old conflict.
The plan for safe zones would deter Syrian bombers from flying over the areas, which in the north would stretch from the Turkish border town of Kilis into Syria south of Aleppo, Syria's largest city. In the south, the missile batteries would be placed in Jordan and cover areas around the Syrian city of Dara'a.
"This kind of passive no-fly zone, if combined with a political and arming strategy with the opposition, could work," said Andrew J. Tabler, a Syria expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Mr. Tabler added that the effort could give the Syrian rebels their "Benghazi pocket," a reference to the area of eastern Libya that was a base for rebel operations in the Libya uprising.
The divided and ineffective Syrian political opposition gathered in Doha, Qatar, in an attempt to forge a more cohesive political force to coordinate with the myriad rebel fighting units on the ground, who fight under the banner of the Free Syrian Army. Those talks came after Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton recently criticized the Syrian National Council, currently the main opposition group, as out-of-touch exiles who needed to absorb more representatives from Syria.
For weeks, Turkish officials, including Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, have voiced frustration over the West's unwillingness to take a more muscular approach to Syria, saying that the inaction has let Mr. Assad prosecute a bloody counteroffensive that has killed thousands and sent a surge of refugees to neighboring countries.
At the same time, there has been an expectation among Turkish officials and rebels here and in Syria that the end of the American presidential campaign could result in a greater effort on the part of the Americans to end the war, no matter who won.
"I believe that the U.S. should handle the issue differently from now on," Mr. Erdogan said Wednesday, according to the semiofficial Anatolian News Agency.
In Doha, some Syrian opposition figures agreed. "Now that the elections are over, the U.S. gets to put Syria on its priority list," said Mulham al-Droubi, a member of the Syrian National Council who is affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood. "Obama is liberated in his second term from pressures of getting re-elected, so he can take bolder decisions."
There were other indications on Wednesday that Western allies would act more forcefully in the wake of the American election. Britain's prime minister, David Cameron, visited a refugee camp in Jordan and was quoted by The Associated Press as saying that the international community should do more to "shape the opposition," and that Britain would open direct talks with rebel military commanders.
Reporting was contributed by Neil MacFarquhar from Beirut, Lebanon; Hala Droubi from Doha, Qatar; Sebnem Arsu from Istanbul; and Rick Gladstone from New York.
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