Turkiye says Kurdish-led armed groups in Syria will be ‘eliminated’
Al Jazeera
FM Hakan Fidan says only ‘a matter of time before YPG is eliminated’ in Syria, urges West to cease supporting group.
Turkiye’s foreign minister has said that it is “only a matter of time” before Kurdish-led armed groups in Syria will be wiped out, and that Ankara would not agree to any situation allowing the armed group YPG to maintain a presence there after the fall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Turkiye sees the People’s Protection Units (YPG) – the main component of the United States-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) – as a “terrorist” group linked to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
“Conditions in Syria have changed. We believe it’s only a matter of time before PKK/YPG is eliminated,” Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan told a news conference in the capital Ankara on Monday.
Fidan warned against any Western support for Kurdish-led groups in Syria.
“If you [the West] have different aims in the region, if you want to serve another policy by using Daesh as an excuse to embolden the PKK, then there is no way for that, either,” he said, using an Arabic name for the ISIL (also known as ISIS) group.
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