close
Friday March 29, 2024

Syria operation meant to ensure Turkish national security: FM

By Our Correspondent
October 14, 2019

ISLAMABAD: Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu maintains Turkey has started the northeastern Syria operation to ensure its national security by removing the danger posed by terrorists along its border regions.

This operation will liberate Syrians living there from the tyranny of terrorist organizations and eliminate the threat to Syria’s territorial integrity and political unity. These two developments would facilitate the safe and voluntary return of displaced Syrians.

In a write-up appeared in a US daily, he says Turkey has never accepted a corridor run by a terrorist group on its border.

“We have repeatedly proposed establishing a safe zone, including at the United Nations General Assembly. We have called on the United States to stop providing material support to terrorists. But the American security bureaucracy couldn’t bring itself to disengage from the group, known for short as the P.Y.D./Y.P.G.“

Turk Foreign Minister said that this is even though American officials, including a secretary of defense, have admitted that the P.Y.D./Y.P.G., which forms the core of Syrian Democratic Forces, is inseparable from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or the P.K.K., in Turkey, which is recognized as a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union and NATO.

“Our American interlocutors seemed to agree that those forces needed to be removed from along our borders and we had even agreed on a timeline. Most recently, military-to-military talks in August ended with a mutual commitment to establish a safe zone from which the P.Y.D./Y.P.G. was supposed to be removed. But the United States did not see this through and gave us the strong impression that it was playing for time as the terrorist group entrenched itself even deeper in Syria.”

Mevlut Cavusoglu has stated that the P.Y.D./Y.P.G. may present itself to the world as the group that fought Daesh, but it also smuggles explosives to the P.K.K. by digging tunnels into Turkish soil.

We have found its members ushering Daesh prisoners toward Turkey. And in November 2017, the BBC reported on a secret deal under which the Syrian Democratic Forces arranged transport and allowed hundreds of Daesh terrorists to escape during the coalition operation to liberate the city of Raqqa. “We had to act. Several voices expressed concerns about the safety of the Kurdish population in Syria.

I want to repeat and emphasize that Turkey’s fight is not against the Kurds. Our fight is against the terrorists. Any description of the situation as “Turks against Kurds” is malicious and false. Kurds are not our enemies,” he added. He vowed that our target is the complex of terror run together by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party and the P.Y.D./Y.P.G., which have recruited child soldiers, intimidated dissidents, altered the demography and forced conscription in areas under their control.

“The Kurds, Arabs, Christians and others who have been suffering under the P.Y.D./Y.P.G. yoke will be better off when freed. The World Council of Aramaean Christians have been asserting this point insistently. Before proceeding with this operation, we have taken all steps to minimize risk to civilians and prevent a humanitarian crisis. Over the past several years, Turkey has provided shelter to large numbers of refugees from northeastern Syria, including Arabs, Kurds and Turkmens. Most of them, including over 300,000 Kurds, were driven from their homes by the terrorists.