ERBIL, Kurdistan region —Syrian President Bashar al-Assad called Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan ‘an Islamist fanatic’ in an interview to be released on Monday.
The scathing attack on his Turkish counterpart was launched less than three weeks after Russia brokered a deal between the two parties to end the ongoing crisis in the Kurdish areas in northeast Syria.
The disparaging comments on Russian government-funded Russia Today were released on Saturday as Syrian government forces clashed with Turkish-backed Islamists rebels in northeast Syria, leaving a number of senior Syrian officers dead.
Assad, who is believed to have won the civil war now in its eighth year thanks to unwavering support from Iran and Russia, has become increasingly emboldened in statements against his foes in recent months.
“The relation between Erdogan and the EU is two-ways,” Assad said when asked about the Turkish threats to flood Europe with migrants. “They hate him but they want him. They hate him [because] they know that he is a fanatic Islamist, they know this, they know that he is going to send them those extremists or maybe terrorists. ”
Russia and Turkey signed an agreement on October 22 to create a buffer zone in northeast Syria and clear the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) from the border region. The parties said that a ceasefire would be in place but fighting has raged ever since.
The Russian-Turkish agreement came after two weeks of relentless Turkish bombing and artillery fire on the Kurdish areas followed by a ground invasion by Turkish-backed Islamists on October 9.
President Donald Trump washed his hands of northeast Syria and the SDF after five years of close alliance with the Kurdish-led forces against the Islamic State (ISIS) and green-lighted a Turkish attack on the eve of October 7.
He has since changed course and said the US would leave a residual force in the area to guard the oil wells to prevent them from falling into ISIS or regime hands.
President Erdogan, who is expected to visit Washington on Wednesday to speak about Syria, had close ties to President Assad prior to the civil war in 2011 but gradually became a vociferous critic of his rule, describing him as a “terrorist.”
“It is absolutely impossible to move ahead with Assad in Syria. For what? How could we embrace the future with the president of a Syria who killed close to 1 million of its citizens?" Erdogan said in December 2017.
"Would the people of Syria want to see such a person as leader? Because I am saying this absolutely clearly and openly that Assad is actually a terrorist involved in state terrorism,”he added.
On Saturday Assad’s Russian-backed air force carried out intense bombing of the town of Jisr al-Shughur in the northwestern governorate of Idlib, killing a number of civilians.
Intense fighting was also reported in the strategic mountain range of Jabal al-Akrad in the governorate of Latakia where a host of jihadist groups including Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham are fighting the Syrian government forces,backed by Russia and Iran-backed Shia militias.
Meanwhile, President Assad leveled the blame for the destruction of his country at the door of the western governments whom he accused of fomenting unrest by supporting what he described as terrorists to create another popular uprising.
Speaking in English, Assad said that the recent attempts to stop an Iranian crude tanker from reaching the Syrian shores was a last-ditch attempt by the West to push the Syrian people to rise up against his government.
