Turkey won't accept any autonomous region in Syria before a legitimate parliament is elected, FM says

Turkey will not accept any de facto autonomous region in Syria before a legitimate parliament is elected, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu says, adding that this does not necessarily mean opposing the rights of the Kurds in northern Syria, Hürriyet Daily News cites the Anadolu agency as reporting.

"As we have stressed many times before, Turkey does not accept any formation of a de facto [autonomous] region or the cutting of ties with other regions [in the country] until an elected Syrian Parliament is established, giving the political system its final shape. Not only Turkey, but other groups inside Syria would not accept it either," Davutoğlu told reporters during his visit to Poland on July 23.

"This does not mean that Turkey is against the rights of any group in Syria, particularly Kurds. On the contrary, Turkey conveyed very serious recommendations, even exerted pressure [on Syria] to protect the citizenship rights of the Kurdish population when our relations with Bashar al-Assad were still good. So this is not a position against our Kurdish brothers in Syria," Davutoğlu is quoted as saying by Hürriyet Daily News.