The AK Party deputy chairman has told that Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad is helping the terrorist PPK without doubt in its bleeding campaign in Turkey.
“Now, Bashar al-Assad is pursuing the idea that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my ally.’ It’s clear that he’s taking the PKK under his wing and applying it against Turkey,” Hüseyin Çelik told on Wednesday at a news conference abiding by a assembling of the AK Party’s Central Executive Board (MYK).
The PKK, enrolled as a terrorist group by Turkey, the European Union and the United States, has been engaging a bleeding campaign in Turkey’s southeastern since 1984. More than 40,000 people have been killed in the decades-long conflict up to now. The terrorist group has recently stepped up its campaign of ferocity in Turkey, killing 10 civilians last week in the southeastern province of Gaziantep.
Turkey has been arrogating that the Syrian administration is helping the PKK in reaction to Ankara’s strong criticism of the Assad regime over its brutal crackdown on oppositions. A senior AK Party official told earlier this month that Ankara has reliable intelligence that the Syrian military deliberately left heavy weapons for the PKK when it abandoned areas in northern Syria.
Turkish officials tell they’re watching closely for signs Syria might regenerate its support for the PKK, which dropped in late 1998 after Turkish tanks massed on the Syrian borderline. Damascus was drew to deport PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan who was later captured in Kenya on Feb. 15, 1999, while going from the Greek Embassy to the Nairobi International Airport, in an operation executed by the National Intelligence Organization (MİT) in Kenya.
During the press conference, Çelik was also asked about a much-debated camp, which is housing Syrian refugees in the southern Turkish province of Hatay and has so far rested closed to the media. The camp, which is located in the Apaydın village of Hatay, houses dozens of defected Syrian army officers and their families. The government has been recently criticized by the main confrontation Republican People’s Party (CHP), which repeatedly asked the government why its deputies have been denied entry into the camp, questioning whether the refugees were being secretly provided with military training in the camp.
“There is no military training there. Turkey is not involved in any secret activity there,” Çelik said.
