Turkish PM says Syria became a 'terrorist state'

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said Wednesday that Syria had become a "terrorist state" carrying out massacres of its own people, Hurriyet reports.
 
"The regime in Syria has become a terrorist state," Erdoğan told a meeting of his ruling AKP party in Ankara. "Syria is not an ordinary country to us. We do not have the luxury to remain indifferent to what's happening there." Turkey, once a strong ally of Syria, broke with Damascus after President Bashar al-Assad's regime began cracking down on dissent, in a conflict which monitoring groups say has claimed more than 26,000 lives since March 2011.
 
Erdoğan once again accused Damascus of committing "mass murders" against its own people and described Assad as "up to his neck in blood".