Turkey, Ankara, August 22 — Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan gave a speech at the Turkish Presidential Palace discussing the ongoing problems with the possible formation of the Kurdish state in northern Syria.
“I believe that my Kurdish brothers would never allow such a formation in northern Syria and southern Turkey. We are one nation within our country in a unitary structure. We are one nation with 80 million people. We have one flag, one homeland and one state. [We have] a homeland of 780,000 square kilometers. We will send those who want to break this nation apart to the grave,” said the president, report from Hurriyet Daily News.
The president continued to discuss his concern with the US and Russian funding and supplying of PKK and PYG forces with military weapons.
“The U.S. tells us, ‘We have the serial numbers of all these armored vehicles. We will take them back when the Raqqa operation is over.’ But I told the U.S. generals and Trump this: ‘That was said to us before regarding northern Iraq, but now we see the U.S. and Russia from the weapons we confiscate from the PKK in northern Iraq. The same thing will happen here tomorrow. Even if we pay you wouldn’t give us these weapons, but you supply [the YPG] with them for free.’ Unfortunately we must keep talking about these things,” says the president.
Source: Hurriyet Daily News
P|M Weighs In:
US supports Kurdish forces who are fighting ISIL. This poses a serious problem for Turkey which identifies PKK as a terrorist organization. (PKK is also identified as a terrorist organization by US DHS) – but the issues (among many) is that PKK also has many off-shoots with many ulterior motives other than fighting ISIL forces.
Historically arming one group to fight another group in an extremely complex war zone does not workout well for anyone.
This issue is not going to go away any time soon.