Erdogan says US continues to support terrorism in Syria

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Thursday night that the United States continues to support terrorism in Syria and defended, on the contrary, that Ankara assumes the responsibility to solve “the Syrian problem”.

“It is the US and coalition forces that mainly fuel terrorism in Syria. They did it brutally and they still do it. They couldn’t get enough of it, and they also fed it in the same way in Iraq,” the Turkish leader has indicated.

He made these comments on board the presidential plane after his trip to the Ukrainian city of Lviv, where he met with Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelenski and UN Secretary General António Guterres to advance the resolution of the war between Ukraine and Russia.

Erdogan has also specified that Washington “is behind” the unrest in Iraq, while saying that he is in contact with Russia for every step it takes in Syria. “Political dialogue or diplomacy between states can never be cut off,” he has added.

On the other hand, Erdogan has weighed in on whether the normalization of diplomatic relations between Turkey and Israel will involve more contact with other countries in the region, such as Egypt. “We hope to take this step,” he has said, as reported by the Anatolia news agency.

The Turkish leader had a telephone conversation with Israeli President Isaac Herzog on Friday, in which he conveyed that the appointment of two ambassadors is an “important step towards the positive development” of relations between the two nations.

Relations between Israel and Turkey were severed in 2010, after the Israeli Navy killed several Turkish pro-Palestinian activists, triggering the naval blockade of the Gaza Strip.

Despite the two countries reaching an agreement in 2016 to resume relations, ties were not fully restored and they even expelled their ambassadors in 2018 because of the crackdown by Israeli security forces on thousands of Palestinian protesters in the Gaza Strip.