Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is still reeling from his election defeat, and seems to be taking his foul mood out on the US and other nations, complaining the Western coalition is bombing Arabs and Turkomen in Syria while backing the “Kurdish terrorist” groups and their growing power base.
Erdogan’s policy toward Syria has been one disaster after another, initially backing the Sunni rebels on the idea they’d more effectively tamp down Kurdish secessionist ambitions, only to see the war explode, leaving them with a border covered by ISIS, al-Qaeda, and a de facto independent Kurdish state run by the YPG.
The YPG is closely linked to Turkey’s banned Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), and is considered a terrorist organization in Turkey. The YPG has also become a key ally to the US and other nations fighting ISIS, as one of the few forces along the ISIS frontier that seems to be able to hold its own.
Erdogan is still seeing the war through the lens of YPG growth in the northeast, and is likely to continue to press the US coalition to cut ties with them. Ironically, if the US did this and the YPG started losing ground, it would mean an influx of Kurdish refugees into Turkey, many of them with PKK ties.
If Erdogan thinks that Kurdish fighters that are fighting ISIS are "terrorists" and supported by the west, I wonder what world think of Erdogan when his been supporting ISIS the barbarians, the right word is, Erdogan and his neo religious politics is the servants to Saudis and GCC religious fundamentalism that supporting barbarism.
YPG? Who they heck are they? It's the first I hear of them. Good ol' Erdogan, completely blind to his own support of terrorists. The minds of these morons who insist on regime change elsewhere are completely impermeable to the concept of blowback. Watch out Recep, you never know who might end up regime changed next.
Erdogan is 100% right. The West led by the U.S. is playing a dirty game trying to create a Kurdish State along North Iraq, Syria, and South East Turkey to totally destabilise the Middle East for the benefit of Israel. Hasn't the crusaders spilled enough blood in the area?
Timur
While it's true that everything the US does in the ME is done on the orders of Israel, it is nevertheless high time that the Kurds had their own state carved out of Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria.
I see no evidence of the US trying to create a state anywhere. They've always resisted the not-so-bad idea of partitioning Iraq. In part because that could stabilize the area. But anyone who offers to take up arms gets the support of the US.
Of course Erdogan objects to the US bombing ISIS and Al Queda; Turkey is allied with ISIS and Al Queda. The idea is to create an ISIS state to their south, which with incomprehensible logic, Erdogan feels is preferable to Assad.
I'm sure he will begin to have doubts when they are done with Assad, and come for him.