Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said Friday it was time to destroy “terrorist” groups that posed a threat to Syria’s survival, namely the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) militant group and Kurdish fighters, Agence France-Presse reported.
“Daesh, the PKK and their affiliates — which threaten the survival of Syria — must be eradicated,” he told journalists while returning from a Cairo summit, using an Arabic acronym for the ISIL.
“It’s time to neutralize the existing terrorist organizations in Syria.”
Turkey views the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) as a terror organization because it is dominated by the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), a Kurdish group it says is linked to outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militants who have fought a decades-long war on Turkish soil.
But the US-backed force led the fight against the ISIL militants in Syria in 2019, with the SDF seen by the United States as a “crucial” to prevent its resurgence in the area.
Erdoğan said his government was taking “preventive measures” against groups that posed a threat to Turkey.
“It is impossible for us to accept such a risk,” he said, expressing hope Syria’s new leaders would not opt to work with them.
“We do not think any power will continue to work with terrorist organizations in the upcoming period,” he said.
“The heads of terrorist organizations such as ISIL and PKK-YPG … will be crushed in the shortest time possible,” he warned.
Erdoğan also said his top diplomat Hakan Fidan would visit Damascus soon, following in the footsteps of spy chief İbrahim Kalın who went to the Syrian capital just four days after Assad’s fall and met with the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) leadership.