The head of Turkish diplomacy Hakan Fidan stressed on Saturday during a telephone conversation with his American counterpart Antony Blinken that Syrian Kurdish fighters could not be tolerated in Syria.
“The PKK/FDS terrorist organization cannot be accepted in Syria,” the ministry spokesperson said, referring to the powerful Kurdish-dominated, US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). who control vast territories in the northeast of the country.
Dissolution of armed groups in Syria
Hakan Fidan explained to his counterpart that it was “important to act in cooperation with the new Syrian administration in order to guarantee the stability of Syria and to carry out the transition period in an orderly manner”, reported the spokesperson.
The new Syrian authorities in Damascus announced last Tuesday an agreement with “all armed groups” for their dissolution, specifying that they would be integrated into the Ministry of Defense. This agreement, however, does not concern the powerful Syrian Democratic Forces.
Turkey, very close to the new authorities in place in Damascus, considers the FDS as an extension of its sworn enemy, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK, Turkish Kurdish). The FDS spearheaded the fight against the jihadist group Islamic State (IS), defeated in 2019 in Syria.
The Kurds had taken advantage of the weakening of Bashar al-Assad’s central power with the war in Syria, launched in 2011, to proclaim an “autonomous region” in the North, attracting the hostility of neighboring Turkey.
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