Turkey strikes U.S.-allied Kurds in Iraq and Syria, drawing condemnation
World
Turkey strikes U.S.-allied Kurds in Iraq and Syria, drawing condemnation
Turkish warplanes hit U.S.-allied Kurdish militant targets in northern Syria and Iraq on Wednesday, killing dozens the military said, in a second day of cross-border raids in regions Turkey called “terrorist havens.” The U.S. has expressed “deep concern” about the strikes, which are part of a widening campaign against the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which Turkey has labelled a terror group that has been waging an insurgency inside the country since 1984. The strikes have underlined the complexities of the battlefields in Iraq and Syria, where twin U.S.-backed offensives are seeking to dislodge ISIS from its last major urban strongholds. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the country informed its partners, including the U.S., ahead of the operation.
There was less than an hour of notification time before the strikes were conducted. …That’s not enough time and this was notification, certainly, not coordination, as you would expect from a partner and an ally in the fight against ISIS.
U.S. Air Force Colonel John Dorrian
Turkey is a key U.S. ally in the fight against ISIS and a fellow NATO member, but the U.S. also has a close relationship with the Kurdish YPG forces, which Turkey sees as a terrorist offshoot of the PKK. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said most of those killed were members of the YPG. The U.S. is also counting on the SDF, a Syrian Arab-Kurdish alliance, to push into the ISIS bastion of Raqa in Syria, and is currently weighing whether to provide the Kurdish faction with heavy weaponry and other material. The SDF accused Turkey of carrying out the strikes “to obstruct the progress of our campaign for Raqa.”
We call on the international community to intervene to put an end to these ongoing attacks on our territory.
SDF statement
