A Turkish presidential aide on Thursday slammed French magazine Le Point for its cover branding President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as “The eradicator,” the state-run Anadolu news agency reported.
“It is clear why [the French] attack our president. They are in panic as their game was spoiled and their pawn in Syria suffered a heavy blow,” İbrahim Kalın wrote on Twitter, referring to Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) in Syria.
According to Kalın, the French magazine, accusing Turkey of “ethnic cleansing,” is located in a country “that colonized Algeria, Gabon, Mauritania, Senegal, Guinea, Congo, Tunisia, Comoros, Madagascar, Djibouti, Mali, Benin, Chad and Morocco, massacred thousands, engaged in slave trade, and turned a blind eye to the Rwanda massacre.”
“Your days of colonialism are over,” Kalın said and stressed that the Kurds are not and will not be their proxy.
Newsweekly Le Point this week put Erdoğan on its cover with the label “The eradicator,” claiming that ethnic cleansing was the Erdoğan method.
On Oct. 9, Ankara launched Operation Peace Spring to secure its border from the Kurdish militia and create a safe zone to relocate Syrian refugees living in Turkey.
Turkey considers the YPG an offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a terrorist organization waging a decades-long bloody insurgency in Turkey’s Southeast.