Erdoğan furious with US, adds Fourth al-Assad condition.

Erdoğan furious with US, adds Fourth al-Assad condition. (HD).

President Tayyip Erdoğan has added a fourth condition to Turkey’s full cooperation against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL): The “regime problem” in Syria. 

Answering questions from a group of reporters on board the presidential plane returning from Afghanistan on Oct. 18, Erdoğan said he saw the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria as the source of problems there, including ISIL.

“There is nothing more useful [for the situation] than al-Assad’s departure,” he said, adding that he did not accept the “who will come after al-Assad?” question as an answer in his talks with other leaders, including Russian President Vladimir Putin.

It is not something new that Erdoğan considers the removal of al-Assad as a priority in the fight against ISIL. Both he and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu have said before that they want to see “Neither ISIL, nor the al-Assad regime” on the other side of Turkey’s 910-km border with Syria.

But it is a new thing for Erdoğan to list this as a condition for full cooperation against ISIL.
So far, he has listed three conditions:

1)    Imposing safe zones in Syrian territory next to the Turkish border for refugees from Syria (now around 1.5 million in Turkey) and for non-ISIL, native fighters like the Free Syrian Army (FSA).

2)    Imposing a no-fly zone in Syrian air space along the Turkish border above those safe zones for the protection of refugees and the FSA (mainly against Syrian air forces, since ISIL does not yet have an air force).

3)    Training and equipping rebel forces apart from ISIL and other al-Qaeda-affiliated groups.

When considered together, the anti-al-Assad stance was there all along. So why did Erdoğan decide to express it openly as a fourth condition now, when talks with the international anti-ISIL coalition, or actually with the U.S. administration, are under way?

The main reason seems to be the direct contact of a U.S. official with the Democratic Union Party (PYD) of Syria, closely linked to the Turkey-origin outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which is on the U.S. list of terrorist organizations, as confirmed on Oct. 16 by Jen Psaki, the spokeswomen for the U.S. State Department.


Hmmmm......Operation Inherent Resolve To degrade and Defeat the terrorist group ISIL, not Operation Erdogan get Assad. It is high time the US makes clear to the Turkish dictator to be that he does not dictate US Policy! Read the full story here.