Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Wednesday that Kurdish militants in Syria should lay down their weapons or “be buried”, amid hostilities between Turkish-backed Syrian fighters and militants since the fall of Bashar. al-Assad this month.
“The separatist killers will either say goodbye to their weapons or,” Erdogan told lawmakers from his ruling AK party in the Turkish parliament.
Erdogan also said Turkey would soon open its consulate in Aleppo and added that Ankara expects an increase in traffic at its borders in the summer of next year as some of the millions of Syrian migrants the country hosts begin returning home. .
Understand the conflict in Syria
The Assad family regime was overthrown in Syria on December 8, after 50 years in power, when rebel groups took over the capital Damascus.
President Bashar al-Assad has fled the country and is in Moscow after gaining asylum, according to a source in Russia.
Syria’s civil war began during the Arab Spring in 2011, when the regime of Bashar al-Assad suppressed a pro-democracy uprising.
The country was plunged into full-scale conflict when a rebel force was formed, known as the Free Syrian Army, to fight government troops.
Furthermore, the Islamic State, a terrorist group, also managed to gain a foothold in the country and came to control 70% of Syrian territory.
Fighting escalated as other regional actors and world powers — from Saudi Arabia, Iran, the United States to Russia — joined in, escalating the country’s war into what some observers described as a “proxy war.”
Russia has allied with Bashar al-Assad’s government to combat the Islamic State and rebels, while the United States has led an international coalition to repel the terrorist group.
After a ceasefire agreement in 2020, the conflict remained largely “dormant”, with minor clashes between the rebels and the Assad regime.
More than 300,000 civilians have been killed in more than a decade of war, according to the UN, and millions of people have been displaced across the region.
