MOSCOW (Realist English). Turkish President Recep Erdoğan is speculating with the bogeymanof the Kurdish threat in his expansionist interests in order to occupy as many Syrian territories as possible, Stanislav Ivanov, a leading researcher at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said in an interview with the EADaily news agency.
“The aggressive actions of Turkish troops in northern Syria have nothing to do with Turkey’s security issues. Over the past 15-20 years, not a single Kurdish militia from Syria has violated the Syrian-Turkish border or has committed a single unfriendly act against the Turkish authorities. On the contrary, the Turkish Armed Forces have repeatedly launched rocket and bomb attacks and artillery and mortar attacks on the adjacent areas of Syria, invaded the Kurdish areas of the SAR (Afrin and others) with their tank and armored personnel carriers columns,” the expert stressed.
According to the orientalist, talking about the territorial integrity of Syria is equivalent to talking about the territorial integrity of Yugoslavia:
“It must be admitted that Syria, artificially created by the French following the results of the First World War on the fragments of the Ottoman Empire, has today split into three hostile enclaves (Arab-Sunni, Arab-Alawite and Kurdish). Assad, with the military support of Iran and the Russian Federation, controls two-thirds of the territory of the SAR, where only a third of its pre-war population lives. Most of the Syrians turned out to be not with Assad. About 8 million live in neighboring countries in refugee camps, 4-5 million — in the territories occupied by Turkey and 4 million — in the north-east of the country (Rojava and the region beyond Euphrates).”
Another military aggression by the Turkish regime in northern Syria may begin at any moment. Turkish forces have concentrated on the near-border territory, who are conducting operations against Kurdish formations there.