Turkey says US airdrops to Kobani are ‘wrong’

AFP — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday criticized as “wrong” the airdrops of ammunition and weapons by US planes to Kurdish fighters battling jihadists in the Syrian town of Kobani.

In an indication of the tensions that remain between Washington and and Ankara on how to deal with the Islamic State group, Erdogan said he could not understand why Kobani was so strategic for the United States.

He said the weapons had fallen into the hands of the Democratic Union Party (PYD) — a Syrian Kurdish group that Ankara does not support — and also IS jihadists.

“It has become clear that this was wrong,” Erdogan told reporters at Ankara airport before leaving on a trip to Latvia and Estonia.

US cargo planes earlier this week dropped ammunition, weapons and medical supplies to the Kurdish fighters who have been battling the jihadists for control of Kobani for over a month.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said at least one of the loads dropped had been picked up by the jihadists. A video purportedly showing this has surfaced online.

But Erdogan indicated that Turkey was equally troubled by the weapons falling into the hands of the PYD, whose armed branch the People’s Protection Units (YPG) has led the fight against the jihadists.

Ankara sees the PYD as the Syrian arm of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), whose armed campaign for self-rule in Turkey’s southeast has left 40,000 people dead over three decades.

“Some of the airdrops have fallen into the hands of the PYD and ISIS,” Erdogan said, using another name for IS. “It’s impossible to achieve results with such an operation.”

“Any support you would give PYD would benefit the PKK. And as Turkey we need to fight against this,” Erdogan added.

“One should not resort to such actions for appearances’ sake,” he said of the airdrops.

Turkey’s animosity towards the PYD puts it at odds with the United States, which favors supporting the group to fight the jihadists and says it should not be equated with the PKK.

Ankara has insisted it shares the West’s abhorrence of IS but also wants a comprehensive strategy to bring down Syrian President Bashar al-Assad after the three-and-a-half year civil war.

Erdogan’s comments came after Turkey agreed to allow Kurdish peshmerga fighters to cross its territory to join the fight against IS in Kobani.

Erdogan said he had made the proposal to bring the peshmerga to Kobani himself in telephone talks with US President Barack Obama.

But Turkey would only cooperate with the peshmerga and the anti-Assad Free Syrian Army (FSA), and not the PYD, he added.

In contrast to its hostility to the PYD, Turkey in recent years has built up strong relations with the Kurdish authorities in the Kurdistan region of Iraq who control the peshmerga forces.

Erdogan said he believed that there were now no civilians left in Kobani, which lies just south of the Turkish border, and some 2,000 fighters inside the city.

“I don’t understand why Kobani is so strategic for the US, there are no civilians left there,” he said.

Turkey is hosting 200,000 refugees from the Kobani region and wants a security zone created inside Syria to accommodate them.