Turkey Launches Operations in Syria to End Bashar al-Assad’s Rule


Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğannow made clear his intentions in Syria this week. He wants to end the rule on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

“In my estimation, nearly 1 million people have died in Syria. These deaths are still continuing without exception for children, women and men. Where is the United Nations? What is it doing? Is it in Iraq? No. We preached patience but could not endure in the end and had to enter Syria together with the Free Syrian Army [FSA],” Erdoğan said at the first Inter-Parliamentary Jerusalem Platform Symposium in Istanbul.

“Why did we enter? We do not have an eye on Syrian soil. The issue is to provide lands to their real owners. That is to say we are there for the establishment of justice. We entered there to end the rule of the tyrant al-Assad who terrorizes with state terror. [We didn’t enter] for any other reason,” the president said.

On Aug. 24, the Turkish Armed Forces launched an operation in Syria, the Euphrates Shield operation, with FSA fighters to clear the country’s southern border of both the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) forces, which Ankara considers as a terrorist group linked to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

Last week, a total of six Turkish troops, of them four in a suspected Syrian government attack, and two in ISIL attacks, were killed in three separate attacks from Nov. 24 to 26.

This development by the small country could be the destabilizing force that could lead to a bigger war in the region. The efforts of President-elect Trump and Putin to create new, positive relations between the US and Russia does offer hope that the very dangerous situation in the Middle East can end with diplomatic solutions, one is always given pause with the simple fact that once sufficient pawns of war are engaged, the path to greater conflicts become inevitable.

Source: Hurriyet Daily News

 



Share

50 Comments

Leave a Reply

Pin It on Pinterest