Erdogan blames ‘alliance of militant groups’ for DC protests

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan blames an alliance of Kurdish, Turkish and Armenian groups proscribed by Turkey for noisy protests in Washington, DC, on Thursday, which led to scuffles with his security guards.

Speaking at the airport on his return to Istanbul after his almost week-long trip to the US, Erdogan says he saw at the protest “representatives” of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has fought a decades-long insurgency against the Turkish state, and the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), which Turkey accuses of being the Syrian arm of the PKK.

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Erdogan also claims there were representatives at the protests from the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA), which carried out a string of deadly attacks in the 1970s and 1980s purportedly aimed at avenging the mass killing of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire from 1915 in World War I.

The president says the groups worked alongside allies of his archenemy, the US-based exiled Turkish preacher Fethullah Gulen, whom Ankara accuses of running the Parallel State Structure group (PDY) and plotting to oust the government.

— AFP