On his way back from a meeting with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin in Sochi on Wednesday, the Turkish leader cast Brett McGurk, the United States Coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa, as a supporter of terrorism when speaking to reporters.
“It deeply disturbs me that this man is arm-in-arm with terrorists in an area where I’m fighting them,” Erdogan said, according to the Daily Sabah. The president also accused McGurk of “almost become the PKK/YPG/PYD’s manager,” referring to the People’s Protection Units (YPG), the backbone of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a main ally of the coalition on the ground in the fight against ISIS, as well as the Democratic Union Party (PYD), which is the ruling Kurdish party in Rojava.
The PKK is an armed group fighting for greater rights for Kurds in Turkey. Ankara considers the YPG to be the Syrian extension of the PKK, seen as a terrorist group in Turkey, and used this as a pretext for the nation’s invasion into Rojava.
The YPG, although ideologically inspired by PKK founder Abdullah Ocalan, denies any links to the PKK.
Kurds have been in control of most of the northeast of Syria for some eight years, taking over in the early years of the popular uprising against President Bashar al-Assad. Turkey has conducted several major campaigns against the Kurdish forces, seizing key areas of Afrin in 2018 and the towns of Sari Kani (Ras al-Ain) and Gire Spi (Tal Abyad) in 2019. That last offensive ended with ceasefires brokered by Washington and Moscow that saw Russian and Syrian regime forces deployed to the frontline between the two sides to keep the truce.
