“Are you our side or the side of the terrorist PYD and PKK organisation?” But Turkey’s main focus has been its fight against the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, which has waged a decades-long insurgency fighting for Kurdish autonomy.
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Ahmet Davutoglu said Wednesday he considered the U.N. Security Council “two-faced” for telling Turkey to open its borders while not moving “a finger to solve the Syria crisis” or to stop the Russian bombardments.
The US-led coalition fighting IS in Syria and Iraq has worked closely with the YPG, the military wing of the PYD, since it launched airstrikes in Syria in September 2014.
The PYD and the PKK share not only ideology but fighters, with the PKK drawing Syrian Kurdish fighters to its camps in northern Iraq and Turkish Kurds serving among the PYD ranks. The PKK is classed as a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the United States and the European Union.
“We’ve expressed our concerns, frankly, when they come into conflict with opposition forces on the ground”, Toner said.
“Is it me who is your partner or the terrorists in Kobane?”
Turkey summoned U.S. Ambassador John Bass to its own Foreign Ministry in response, according to a report from Turkey’s semi-official Anadolu news agency.
“Turks have a phobia of Kurds because they are scared of their Turkish Kurds, some 20 million of them living in Turkey”, Abd Salam Ali, the Kurdish Democratic Union Party’s representative to Russian Federation, told RIA Novosti, adding that “Kurds have interfered with Erdogan’s plans in Turkey”. But the non-Turkish PYD has been consistently treated by Washington as a legitimate body, brushing aside Turkey’s allegations that its members are not only terrorists but are ethnically cleansing non-Kurdish elements in the Syrian population.
Turkey’s military on Thursday ended a “successful” operation to root out Kurdish militants from the southeastern town of Cizre, the country’s interior minister said. “We don’t, as you know, recognize he PYD as a terrorist organization”. In recent days, a Russian-backed Syrian government offensive around the city of Aleppo has sent tens of thousands of people fleeing to the Turkish border. The Turkish head of state added the United Nations should not be calling on Turkey to take in more refugees from Syria, but should be urging other states to receive refugees from Turkey.
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“If Turkey does not solve the Kurdish issue peacefully and keeps attacking the Kurds, the U.S.’s Syria policy in general and the IS policy in particular will be more hard to implement”, Gonol Tul, the founding director of the Middle East Institute’s Center for Turkish Studies, told VOA.
