Erdogan says Turkey will capture Kurdish-held town in Syria

ANKARA, Turkey (Kurdistan24) – Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared on Tuesday that his country would next attack the town of Manbij in Syrian Kurdistan (Rojava) after capturing the Islamic State-held city of al-Bab nearby.

In an opening speech at a ceremony for the 2016-2017 Turkish academic year at his Ankara Palace, Erdogan revealed that Turkey and the Free Syrian Army (FSA) factions that it backs would "clear" the Kurdish forces from Manbij.

The United States-backed Kurdish People's Protection Units YPG liberated Manbij from the IS in mid-August, in a campaign that lasted nearly two months and took the lives of about 250 fighters.

"They wanted to create a terror corridor on the Syrian border. We will never allow that. We cannot let our country's south to be left alone with terror. Let the friends and foes know this," said the Turkish President referring the de-facto Kurdish autonomous region alongside northern Syria large parts of where the IS formerly held sway.

Erdogan reiterated his insistence that Manbij, a multi-ethnic town and county in Syria’s Aleppo governorate that had a population of 75,000 people before the civil war, retained an Arab identity and thus should not be at Kurdish hands.

"We told the US that the YPG has no place in Manbij. Yesterday our American allies requested help from us. We have been telling this from the very start, that we are the ones who know here [Manbij]. We told them you do not know. We know the history and everything else about here," added Erdogan.

Turkey and FSA made an incursion into Syria on August 24 in an attempt to drive the IS from the border and expel the YPG to the east of the River Euphrates.

Erdogan repeated his invocation of an Ottoman oath that claims Mosul, Kurdistan Region, Syrian Kurdistan, other parts of the Middle East and Balkans as Turkish soil.

The Turkish President also said that the newly-captured Syrian village of Dabiq had "a different place" in the Turkish history, mentioning an early 16th-century battle between the Ottoman Empire and Mamluk Sultanate that resulted in the victory of the former.

The Ottomans then went on capturing much of the Middle East as the Sultan Selim I claimed the title Caliph after ending the Abbasid Dynasty in Egypt.

Editing by Ava Homa