Turkey's Syria incursion to prevent Greater Kurdistan: AKP lawmaker

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region (Kurdistan24) – The reason Turkey launched its military ground incursion into northern Syria was to prevent the formation of a Kurdistan, according to a current lawmaker of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).

Mehmet Ali Sahin, the AKP lawmaker, and a long-time friend of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, told his party’s supporters in the Turkish province of Karabuk that “imperialist Westerners had a project of founding a Kurdistan.”

Sahin invoked the Treaty of Sevres which a defeated Ottoman Empire signed with the Allied Powers led by the British Empire and France after World War I. The treaty was meant to give Kurdish people a right to vote for self-determination.

Both sides aborted Sevres, but a young, Ottoman inheritor Turkish state continued to treat prospects of a Kurdistan as an existential threat.

“[Westerners’] maps showing a Kurdistan encompassing Kurds in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey and extending to the Mediterranean Sea surfaced,” Sahin said, according to the government-funded Anadolu news agency.

Sahin visited Karabuk Province to garner support for his party’s “yes” campaign in the upcoming mid-April referendum on whether to give Erdogan executive powers.

The former Speaker of the Turkish Parliament stated his country had no intentions of “stealing” Syrian lands, but they had to act to prevent Kurdistan “from reaching west of the River Euphrates.”

Turkey began the Operation Euphrates Shield in August 2016 to drive the Islamic State (IS) from a portion of its southern border and deny US-backed Kurdish forces further territorial gains.

Stating “almost every country” had troops in Syria, Sahin declared Turkey’s defense lines were now in al-Bab, a northern Syrian town recently captured by Turkish proxies.

The town is geopolitically strategic to Turkish interests as it remains in between the two Kurdish cantons of Kobani and Afrin in Syrian Kurdistan (Rojava).

Clashes with IS and later the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) killed some 70 Turkish soldiers and hundreds from the Free Syrian Army (FSA) groups Turkey backs.

After the Kurdistan Region, the emergence of a second Kurdish quasi-state or autonomous region in the Middle East has alarmed a Turkey fearful of similar demands by Kurds in its eastern provinces.

Editing by Karzan Sulaivany