Turkey slams US plans to create ‘terrorist army’ at border
Ankara, Jan 15 : Washington’s plans to create a 30,000-strong border guard unit in Syria that would include Kurdish militants was met with ire by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday, who threatened of further military action in the region.
Hardliner Erdogan made the remarks during a strongly-worded speech in the capital Ankara, in which he said the Turkish armed forces were poised to use military might to sink the US-backed proposals before they could materialise, Efe news agency reported.
“The US now admits it is creating a terrorist army along our border. What we must do is drown this army before it is born,” Erdogan said, vowing to clean Turkey’s 900-km frontier with Syria of “terrorists”.
US military plans to form a border guard force predominantly composed of Kurdish YPG fighters — Washington’s closest ally in the regional fight against the Islamic State terror group — has also been denounced by Russia and the Syrian government, who both warned that it jeopardised Syria’s territorial unity.
The US-led coalition in Syria announced the blueprints on Sunday.
Erdogan said the Turkish military was ready to strike the Kurdish-held Syrian regions of Manbij and Afrin at any moment.
Turkish officials regard the Syrian YPG group to be a branch of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a Kurdish separatist guerrilla group that has conducted a low-scale civil war in eastern Turkey for decades.
They have consistently rejected the notion of a Kurdish autonomous region across its southern border.
Mustafa Bali, a spokesman for the Syrian Democratic Forces — an ethnically mixed umbrella group whose largest fighting force is the YPG — told Efe via telephone on Monday that the creation of the border guard force was slated to get underway this year.
The force would stretch from Syria’s northern borders with Turkey and Iraq down to the front lines held by units and allies of the Syrian regimes further south.
The government of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad, however, has pledged to recover all territory lost in the civil war, including the Kurdish-controlled countryside in the north.
The SDF played a pivotal role in the military campaigns that recovered the city of Raqqa and northern areas of Der Ezzor from the IS in 2017.
But a Turkish military intervention in northern Syria in August 2016 thwarted the establishment of a Kurdish-controlled corridor of land along the entirety of the border.
The US’ continued support for the YPG dealt a hammer blow to its relations with Turkey, a NATO ally.
IANS
