Turkey gave a clear warning to Masoud Barzani, president of the Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Administration, that the autonomous region in northern Iraq would not be applied to Syria, Turkey’s premier has said, Hurriyet reports.
“We cannot let playing of such a scenario here [in Syria]. We told this to Barzani too. We wanted him to know this,” Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan told a group of journalists on board a plane en route from Berlin to Ankara late on Oct. 31 in an apparent reference to the possibility of the founding of an autonomous Kurdish entity in northern Syria.
“Barzani said there was not and will not be such a thing; moreover he tried to tell us that the Democratic Union of Kurdistan (PYD) is not the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK),” Erdoğan said, adding that they had warned the Iraqi Kurdish leader that in case of such an scenario in Syria Turkey’s stance would not be as it was for Iraq.
