Erdogan: I told Putin and Trump we won’t step back in Syria
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said he told both U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin that “Turkey will not step back in Syria,” vowing that the ongoing operation in Afrin will be expanded to other parts of country, including Manbij, according to Hurriyet Daily News.
“Last night I spoke with U.S. President Trump on these issues. I discussed the same things with Putin two days ago. I told them: ‘We won’t take steps backward from here. We are on the side of the suffering and the oppressed,’” Erdogan said in an address at a meeting of his Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Istanbul on March 23.
The Turkish president added that the operations “will not end in Afrin. Next are Idlib and Manbij”.
Turkish troops and their Syrian Islamist allies captured the Syrian city of Afrin from Syrian Kurdish forces on Sunday, Ahval reports. While there were no U.S. troops in Afrin, U.S. forces are present on the ground in the Syrian region of Manbij helping to train Syrian Kurds to fight Islamic State. Although Turkish officials have said they had reached an understanding with the United States to remove Kurdish-led forces from Manbij, U.S. officials have denied such a deal.
Erdogan said more than 3,700 of what he called terrorists had been neutralised – killed or captured – in Afrin. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the Syrian civil war, said some 1,500 Kurdish fighters had been killed in the two-month cross border offensive.
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