Türkiye has made concrete contributions to the joint fight against the Daesh terrorist group, the deputy foreign minister said Monday while condemning the PKK/YPG’s destabilizing actions in the same region.
At a Global Coalition to Defeat Daesh ministerial meeting in Washington, D.C., Nuh Yılmaz "once again emphasized the unique and concrete contributions that Türkiye has made to this fight since the beginning," said a Turkish Foreign Ministry statement.
He also highlighted that "the PKK terrorist organization and its extensions have become the most serious destabilizing factor in Syria and Iraq," the ministry said on X.
Türkiye opposes U.S. support for the YPG due to its affiliation with the PKK, which has waged a terror campaign against Türkiye for 40 years, resulting in the deaths of more than 40,000 people, including women, children and infants, according to official figures.
While the U.S. considers the YPG a key partner in the fight against Daesh in Syria, it does not recognize the YPG as a terrorist group although it does acknowledge the PKK as such.
This issue remains a major sticking point in relations between the two NATO allies.
The U.S.-led Global Coalition to Defeat Daesh was formed in September 2014 to fight the terror group in Iraq and Syria. The coalition has members from nearly 87 countries and organizations.
US-YPG ties
The U.S. has approximately 2,500 troops in Iraq and 900 in neighboring Syria as part of the coalition against Daesh, which once held roughly a third of the two countries but was territorially defeated in Iraq at the end of 2017 and in Syria in 2019.
Washington last month pulled out the coalition forces from its bases in Iraq but U.S. and other coalition troops are expected to remain in Irbil, in the semi-autonomous Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) in the north for approximately one additional year, until around the end of 2026, to facilitate ongoing operations against Daesh in Syria.
Washington’s Syria policy is focused on fighting against Daesh remnants and training PKK/YPG partners in the region.
Taking advantage of the power vacuum created by the Syrian civil war in 2011, the PKK/YPG has since 2015 occupied several Syrian provinces, including Arab-majority Deir el-Zour, a resource-rich region bordering Iraq, bisected by the Euphrates River and home to dozens of tribal communities.
The terrorist group has forced many locals to migrate, bringing in its militants to change the regional demographic structure, conducting arbitrary arrests, kidnapping children of local tribes for forced recruitment and assassinating tribe leaders to yoke local groups.
It has also seized the region's oil wells – Syria's largest – and smuggles oil to the Syrian regime, despite U.S. sanctions, to generate revenue for its activities.
Since then, U.S. forces in Syria have trained thousands of YPG/PKK terrorists in their military bases in the region under the pretext of combating terrorism. The U.S. has also provided YPG/PKK terrorists with huge amounts of weapons and combat equipment.
Türkiye, which has troops inside Syria, and Turkish-backed opposition groups in Syria's northwest routinely clash with the PKK/YPG, which seeks to establish a terror corridor along the country's border.
Since 2016, Türkiye has carried out successive ground operations – Euphrates Shield in 2016, Olive Branch in 2018 and Peace Spring in 2019 – to expel the PKK/YPG and Daesh forces from border areas of northern Syria, as well as Iraq and to enable the peaceful settlement of residents.
Ankara, which has taken some steps for possible normalization with Damascus since last year, has also repeatedly called on its NATO ally to cut off support to the PKK/YPG.