Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Saturday lambasted students at Bogaziçi University who protested other students for commemorating soldiers killed in a military operation in Syria and promised to clean “communist and terrorist students” out of universities, the Cumhuriyet daily reported.
On March 19 a group of students protested other students who had set up a stand and distributed Turkish delight in memory of Turkish soldiers killed during the Turkish military’s operation in Afrin, Syria. Police identified 17 students and detained five of them, while 12 are being sought.
Describing youths who set up stands for slain soldiers as “believers, local and national,” Erdoğan at his party meeting in Samsun province slammed the students who protested them, calling them “communists, traitors and terrorists.”
“Those are terrorist youths. We will conduct investigations into them. After identifying them, we will not let them get an education at the universities because a university is not a place for educating terrorist youths. A university educates the generation who will serve their country and nation,” Erdoğan said during a speech at his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) congress at Yaşar Doğu Sport Hall in the Tekkeköy district of Samsun.