Alwaght- Top Turkish officials have continued their onslaught on Western countries whom they accuse of backing terrorist groups.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday slammed France for supporting terrorism, saying "France aids, abets and supports terror and they host terrorists at Elysee Palace. You can't explain it and you can't get rid of terrorism. As long as the West feeds these terrorists, it will sink."
In a meeting in late March with a Syrian Kurdish SDF delegation at the Elysee Palace, French President Emmanuel Macron assured the SDF of French support against ISIS, and also claimed that the SDF had “no operational link with this terrorist group,” meaning the PKK.
The SDF is mostly composed of, and militarily led by, the People's Protection Units (YPG), a mostly Kurdish militia in Syria.
Turkey maintains YPG-SDF is the Syrian offshoot of terrorist PKK, listed as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the US, and the EU. During PKK over 30 years of violence against Turkey, more than 40,000 people have been killed, including women and children. PKK is fighting to secede from Turkey and is also supporting the Western-backed SDF Kurdish militants in Syria who also seek to secede from the Arab country.
Elsewhere, Turkish foreign minister said the US policy of arming the PKK and YPG militants in Syria was a "point of discord" between Ankara and Washington.
“A point of discord with the United States is its policy of arming the PKK and YPG to act as foot soldiers, even as they have a history of terrorism,” Mevlut Çavuşoglu wrote in an article -- titled The Meaning of Operation Olive Branch -- for the American news magazine Foreign Policy published on April 5.
Cavusoglu said the arming of the militants is a “legally and morally questionable policy that was prepared by the Obama administration in its waning days and somehow crept into the Trump administration”.
He said the US has “played into the hands of all its critics and opponents by deciding to form an alliance with terrorists despite its own values and its 66-year-old alliance with one of their primary targets, Turkey.”
