Turkey afraid of Kurdish victories against Daesh: Analyst

Press TV has interviewed Richard Becker, with the ANSWER coalition, in San Francisco, and Jihad Mouracadeh, a political analyst based in Beirut, to discuss Turkey’s recent shelling of Kurdish villages inside Syrian territories.

Becker hails the major victories of Syrian Kurdish forces in their battles against the Daesh Takfiri group near the Turkish border.

Being “the biggest oppressor of Kurdish people,” Turkey deems as negative these advancements and fears the emergence of a rival “autonomous Kurdish region” near its frontiers inside Syria, the analyst argues.

Becker raises the issue of Turkey’s membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), saying that the Western military alliance needs to make clear its stance on the shelling.

He describes Washington’s call on Turkey to stop the shelling as a contradiction to the American policy of propping up the NATO member, which serves as “a bastion of US militarism” in the region.

In his concluding remarks, Becker rejects claims that various militant groups active in Syria are different in nature, adding that the “foreign intervention” led by the US and its allies, particularly Saudi Arabia and Turkey, are fueling the militancy gripping the Arab state.

For his part, Mouracadeh says that an autonomous Kurdish region allied with the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is a non-starter for Turkey and Ankara will go “as far as necessary” to stop that.

He further notes that Turkey’s NATO membership has nothing to do with its standoff with the Kurds.

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