Failure of the international community to help Turkey with millions of refugees prompted the county’s peace operation in northeastern Syria, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said.
In an article he penned for The Wall Street Journal, Erdogan said no country has felt the pain of the ensuing humanitarian crisis more severely than Turkey since the Syrian civil war began in 2011, according to Daily Sabah.
“At a certain point, Turkey reached its limit,” he said, adding that the world ignored Turkey’s repeated warnings of its inability to tackle the problem of caring for more than 3.6 million Syrian refugees without international support.
“My administration concluded that the international community wasn’t going to act, so we developed a plan for northern Syria,” said Erdogan. “Absent an alternative plan to deal with the refugee crisis, the international community should either join our efforts or begin admitting refugees.”
Turkey on Wednesday launched Operation Peace Spring east of the Euphrates River in northern Syria to secure its borders by eliminating terrorist elements and to ensure the safe return of Syrian refugees and Syria’s territorial integrity.
Ankara’s main target in the operation is the PKK terror group and its Syrian offshoot, the People’s Protection Units (YPG).
In its more than 30-year terror campaign against Turkey, the PKK — listed as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the U.S. and the European Union — has been responsible for the deaths of 40,000 people, including women, children and infants.
Erdogan asserted that Turkey has no problem with any ethnic or religious group in Syria.
“From our perspective, all citizens of the Syrian Arab Republic — who don’t belong to terrorist groups — are equal. In particular, we object to the equation of the PKK with the Syrian Kurds,” he wrote.
The president said Ankara will ensure that no Daesh members incarcerated in the region escape, expressing Turkey’s readiness to work with source countries and international organizations on the rehabilitation of foreign terrorist fighters’ spouses and children.
In the article, Erdogan also slammed several European countries for their failure to stop the influx of foreign terrorist fighters in 2014 and 2015.
