Speaking about operations targeting the outlawed the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and Kurdish Peoples’ Protection Units (YPG) in Iraq and Syria, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Saturday said the conquest is imminent.
“You see with whose support how they [YPG/PKK] attack us from there [Syria/Iraq]. With mortars and such. But we are making them a graveyard, non-stop. We said, ‘We are doing it by ourselves now, not with support from anybody else’, and so we are. We always believed and said: The conquest is imminent. With God’s will, we continue to believe this. Those who believe that the conquest is imminent also believe this. What is it? The support is only from God,” Erdoğan told the general assembly of the All Industrialists and Businessmen’s Association (TUMSIAD) in İstanbul.
‘We can come immediately in the night’
“We know what to do right on time. We can come immediately, in the middle of the night.” Erdoğan added when talking about cross-border air operations targeting Syria and Iraq.
Erdoğan said Turkey has been conducting the largest cross-border military operations since those in Cyprus in 1974.
The Turkish president also said Turkey and the United States could join forces to turn Raqqa into a “graveyard” for the Islamic State in Iraq and The Levant (ISIL).
Erdoğan said he would present US President Donald Trump at their meeting on May 16 with “documents” proving the YPG’s links to the PKK.
Continuing his campaign against the European Union that started before an April 16 referendum in Turkey, Erdoğan said: “This nation has a limit to its patience. You ask why does Erdoğan talk this way? You say ‘dictator.’ Patience. You make all sorts of insults. Patience. Patient until when? Up until a point.”