Syria in crisis now because Obama had no peace plan: Deputy PM

ANKARA

AA photo

Syria reached unprecedented crisis because the West, particularly the Obama administration, did not have a peace plan, Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmuş said Jan. 10.  

Kurtulmuş, in his speech at an Ambassadors’ Conference in Ankara, said the Syrian issue had become a global problem as terrorist organizations were uncontainable and could easily spread to countries outside of their domains. 

“Those who are talking about cooperation in the fight against terrorism should reflect on their history and remember how they once hosted bloody-handed dictators,” he said, accusing the West of hypocrisy and having double standards. 

“If only we had photographs showing Western leaders arm-in-arm with [Muammer] Kaddafi, Saddam Hussein and [Anastasio] Somoza,” he stated.

Kurtulmuş expressed resentment at Western states for waging proxy wars, saying that they could be targeted back by the same organizations they supported. He accused them of “supporting terrorist organizations in order to maximize their regional interests just because they did not have troops on the ground.”

“We will bring global forces trying to conduct disharmony in the Middle East into line. Western countries cannot escape from the dangers of terrorism or from the dangers of global migration even if they blocked their borders with wire braids or covered the sky with a steel dome,” he said.

He said terrorist attacks were happening in Turkey only because it was the only state that could prevent a “second Sykes-Picot” order in the region, suggesting that groups such as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the Fetullahist Terrorist Organization (FETÖ) were being used by the West.