Syrian President Bashar Assad is quoted as saying he regrets “100%” that a Turkish jet was shot down after entering Syrian airspace last week, in an interview given to a Turkish newspaper.

In a very apparent effort to assuage Turkey’s anger over the incident, Assad argued that the plane was flying in an area previously used by Israel’s air force when it bombed a nuclear facility in 2008.

Last week, Turkish PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan condemned Syria’s action and described the neighbouring country as a “clear and present threat”. Turkey’s border areas were reinforced with rocket-launchers and anti-aircraft guns on Friday. It has also emerged that the Turkish air force scrambled fighter jets on three consecutive days after Syrian helicopters were said to have approached the border.

In the interview, Assad appears to try to cool the dispute, saying Syria had not and would not bolster its military presence, regardless of the actions of Mr Erdogan’s government.

“We will not allow (the shooting down) to turn into open combat between the two countries,” President Assad was quoted as saying.

Meanwhile, late on Monday night, 85 Syrian soldiers, including 14 senior officers, had defected across the Turkish border. It is one of the biggest groups of army defections since the March 2011 uprising in Syria began.

It is now very clear that while Assad’s regime has brutally tried to quell the rebellion in Syria, the opposition is also committing atrocities, and this has also been given leverage by UN human rights chief Navi Pillay. On Monday, at least 78 people were killed in violence throughout Syria and clashes continued yesterday in suburbs of Damascus, Deraa and Deir al-Zour.

Cumhuriyet, the paper which published the interview, quotes Assad as saying that the plane’s identity had become clear only after it was brought down. “We want to think of it as a pilot’s error and we would consider this an isolated incident,” he is reported as saying. “I say 100% ‘if only we had not shot it down’.”

Assad also said that the soldier who opened fire on the F-4 Phantom had no access to radar.

It is very clear that Syria is making excuses. Assad knows that Turkey will not tolerate further transgressions and is monitoring everything that the Syrian military is doing on a daily basis. Turkey has already tolerated a cross-border fire incident when Syrian troops fired into a refugee camp in Turkey. If the Turkish government decides to up the ante and push its case in the United Nations, it would spell curtains for the regime, and this is why Assad is trying so desperately hard to soothe tensions. It is not likely to happen.