Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan declared that his country would do “whatever it takes” to ensure its security if the new Syrian administration failed to dispel Ankara’s concerns about Kurdish groups.
Turkey views the YPG, a militant group led by the US-allied Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militants. The latter have fought an insurgency against the Turkish state for 40 years and are considered terrorists in Turkey, the US and the EU.
Hostilities have escalated since the overthrow of the Syrian government led by Bashar al-Assad. Assad’s fall has put Kurdish factions in a predicament as they try to retain political gains made over the past 13 years.
Fidan stated that Ankara’s preferred option would be to resolve the issue in accordance with Syria’s territorial unity, sovereignty and integrity. The YPG should be disbanded immediately, he added.
If it doesn’t happen, we have to protect our own national security. (…) The new reality, hopefully, they will address these issues, but at the same time, (the) YPG/PKK, they know what we want. We don’t want to see any form of military threat to ourselves. Not the present one, but also the potential one.
Ankara, along with its Syrian allies, has carried out several cross-border offensives against the YPG-led SDF in northern Syria, demanding that Washington stop supporting the militants. However, the US-backed SDF played an important role in defeating Islamic State militants in 2014-2017 with US air support.
The fight against ISIS, there is only one job: to keep ISIS prisoners in prisons, that’s it.
Fidan also said that the Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group, which stormed Damascus to topple Assad, had “excellent co-operation” with Turkey against the Islamic State and al-Qaeda in the past.
