Turkey’s Erdogan rules out talks with Syrian Kurds
ANKARA,— Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday firmly ruled out any negotiations with Kurdish militants in Syrian Kurdistan (Rojava), saying their only option was to lay down arms and retreat.
He dismissed calls from foreign powers, including the United States, who have demanded a ceasefire in Turkey’s week-old operation in the Kurdish region in northern Syria.
“There are some leaders who are trying to mediate… There has never been any such thing in the history of the Turkish republic as the state sitting at the same table with a terror organisation,” Erdogan said in a speech to parliament.
“Our proposal is that right now, tonight, all the terrorists lay down their arms, their equipment and everything, destroy all their traps and get out of the safe zone that we have designated,” he said.
This was “the quickest way of solving the problem in Syria,” he added.
Turkey launched Operation Peace Spring on October 9 with the aim of establishing a “safe zone” across northern Syria, which would push back Kurdish fighters from the Turkish border and allow for the repatriation of Syrian refugees.
Erdogan said that once the safe zone was established, “stretching from Manbij to the Iraqi border”, then the operation would have “ended on its own”.
Turkey, the only country that sees the Syrian Kurdish YPG and PYD as “terrorists” linked to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
But in 2013 Ankara agreed with the PKK on a peace accord to end the three-decade-old conflict. The Turkish government begins negotiation with jailed Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan and the founder of the PKK. The process collapsed in 2015.
The United Nations says 160,000 people have fled their homes as Turkish forces advance. The regional Kurdish administration puts the number of displaced at 270,000.
The Kurdish Democratic Union Party PYD and its powerful military wing People’s Protection Units YPG/YPJ, Key ally to U.S. and considered the most effective fighting force against IS in Syria and U.S. has provided them with arms. The YPG, which is the backbone of the Syrian Democratic Forces SDF forces, has seized swathes of Syria from Islamic State.
The Kurdish forces expelled the Islamic State from its last patch of territory in the eastern Syrian village of Baghouz in March 2019.
Syria’s Kurds have detained thousands of local and foreign fighters suspected of fighting for Islamic State, as well as thousands of related women and children.
11,000 Kurdish male and female fighters had been killed in five years of war to eliminate the Islamic State “caliphate” that once covered an area the size of Great Britain in Syria and Iraq.
Copyright © 2019, respective author or news agency, Ekurd.net | AFP
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