Alwaght- Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu suggested Iran and Russia coordinated with Ankara to control the US withdrawal from Syria in order to prevent “terrorists” from taking up the vacated space.
"The United States have been facing certain difficulties with the process of the troops' withdrawal from Syria. We want to coordinate this process with Russia and Iran, with which we had arranged work in the framework of the Astana process. In order for terrorist organisations not to fill in the void,"” Turkey's top diplomat said Wednesday.
The proposal from Cavusoglu comes as Ankara and Washington are engaged in a bitter war of words over the US troops' withdrawal from Syria. On Tuesday, US National Security advisor John Bolton blasted an opinion piece penned by Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for the New York Times as both “offensive and wrong".
Erdogan praised his own efforts on combating terrorism in Syria, while criticizing the US-backed operations in Raqqa and the Iraqi city of Mosul, as well as recalling the “lesson of Iraq” and the “premature declarations of victory,” which led to emergence of ISIS terrorist group.
Prior to that exchange, Bolton demanded safety guarantees for Syria’s Kurds from Turkey, naming it a precondition for the US troops withdrawal from the country. Turkey’s President, in his turn called Bolton’s demands a “huge mistake” and refused to “swallow” them. He also reiterated Ankara’s resolve to fight “terrorism” in Syria, stressing that it actually seeks to protect the “Kurdish brothers” in the neighboring country.
