Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has used a meeting with US Defense Secretary James Mattis to relay his disappointment with Washington over its support for Kurdish groups in Syria, sources say.
In a meeting in Turkey’s capital Ankara on Wednesday, Erdogan told the visiting Pentagon chief that the ongoing military cooperation between the US and the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) made him feel “uneasy,” Turkish presidential sources said.
Ankara views the YPG as a terror organization linked to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a militant group that has been fighting the central Turkish government since 1984.
While the US acknowledges the YPG’s connection to the PKK, it also deems the group as an important element in the ongoing fight against the Daesh terror group in Syria.
Over the past months, Washington has been purportedly assisting the Kurdish group in its fight against Daesh militants controlling Syria’s…