Erdogan Wants to expand Turkish Military operations in Iraq and Syria. The Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan wants to increase the Turkish army’s cross-border operations in Iraq and Syria.
He will “dry out the source of the intimidation” for his country, Erdogan announced Saturday at the party conference of his AK party in Ankara.
This announcement may provoke the crisis with the US. In Northern Syria, US-backed fighters and Turkish troops face each other.
The US supports Kurdish groups that have succeeded in reducing its IS. They control an area of hundreds of kilometres along the border.
Turkey, however, sees the units under the leadership of the YPG group at its edge as a Syrian branch of the halted Kurdish PKK.
Turkey has already entered Syria various times to conquer areas in the Kurds. It happened, for example, in the Afrin region.
Turkey also active in northern Iraq
Turkey is also in dispute with the Kurds in Iraq. Turkish soldiers are active in northern Iraq, where the PKK is increasingly withdrawing.
In September last year, the North Iraqi Kurds voted overwhelmingly in a referendum on independence from the rest of the country.
Just like the Iraqi government in Baghdad, Turkey rejects an independent Kurdish state.
