ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said it is “impossible” to envision a future for Syria that includes Bashar al-Assad. “Assad is definitely a terrorist who has carried out state terrorism,” Erdogan said on Wednesday at a joint news conference in Tunis with Tunisian President Beji Caid Essebsi. “It is impossible to continue with Assad. How can we embrace the future with a Syrian president who has killed close to a million of his citizens?” he asked. A Syrian government source responded to Erdogan’s inflammatory remarks, telling state-run SANA news that the Turkish president’s “paranoia and delusions” have led him to forget that his “worn-out empire has vanished forever.” The unnamed source from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated that Erdogan would not be permitted to interfere in Syrian national decisions. Erdogan has long opposed Assad’s regime, but had toned down his language recently as Ankara coordinated peace efforts for its war-torn neighbor with Moscow and Tehran, two governments backing Damascus. The three will be putting on a peace conference in Sochi in late January. Erdogan is particularly opposed to Kurdish groups who control a quarter of Syrian territory in the north of the country. “Northern Syria has been handed over as a terror corridor. There is no peace in Syria and this peace won’t come with Assad,” Erdogan stated. “It is impossible for Turkey to accept this,” he asserted. Ankara insists that the dominant Kurdish groups in northern Syria, the PYD and the armed YPG and YPJ, are extensions of the PKK, a named terrorist organization. The groups deny the charge. Last year, Turkish forces launched Operation Euphrates Shield to cleanse the border area of “terrorists,” naming both ISIS and the Kurdish groups. This fall, Turkish forces began establishing observation posts in Syria’s Idlib province, overlooking the Kurdish canton of Afrin.
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