Turkey violating territorial integrity of Syria: Pundit

Turkey's prolonged military presence on Syrian soil is a “blatant aggression against the sovereignty of the Syrian state,” because Damascus has not allowed Ankara to deploy its military forces inside the country, Marwa Osman, a political commentator told Press TV’s program 'The Debate' on Sunday.

She argued that the reason behind the prolongation of Turkey’s military incursion into Syria is that US, French and British forces use Turkish bases to launch airstrikes not against the Daesh terrorists, but against the Syrian Arab army, as happened two weeks ago in Dayr al-Zawr.

Osman also touched upon Ankara’s intervention in Syria’s internal affairs, saying that the conflict in the Arab nation started in the first place when Turkey opened its borders to foreign-backed terrorists to infiltrate into the country and wreak havoc there.

According to the analyst, Syria has had the right to bomb Turkey’s military forces and equipment since the beginning of the conflict in 2011, because Turkish forces entered Syria to support mercenaries whose mission was to destabilize the country.

The Turkish Parliament on October 1, the first day of the new legislative year, authorized the government to further hold troops in Syria and Iraq until September 30, 2017, based on a mandate which was first approved by the parliament in October 2014 and was renewed for another year in September 2015.

Ankara, in December 2015, first deployed some 150 soldiers equipped with heavy weapons and backed by two dozen tanks to Bashiqa, located on the outskirts of Mosul, the capital of Iraq’s Nineveh province and the country’s second-largest city, which has been under the control of Daesh since June 2014.

Another panelist on Press TV's “The Debate”, Yunus Soner, who is deputy chairman of the Turkish Patriotic Party, said there is a broad consensus in the Turkish Parliament about the necessity of the military operation inside Syrian borders to maintain “territorial integrity” in both Turkey and Syria.

He also opined that Turkey's military presence on Syrian soil would lead Ankara to establish a better relationship with Damascus, adding that the Turkish government is not speaking of regime change in Syria any more, but it wants to help maintain “national unity” in the Arab country.

According to the politician, “This military intervention, against ISIS (Daesh) on the one hand and the YPG on the other, has brought Turkey in a deep conflict against the United States and it has strengthened the ties of Ankara with Moscow and has opened the way to reestablish ties with Damascus as well.”

He concluded that Turkey is fighting a Western plan aimed at “turning Syria into a federation” that envisions a Kurdish zone in the north and a kind of sectarian division in the rest of the country.

The foreign-sponsored conflict in Syria, which started in March 2011, has claimed the lives of more than 400,000 people, according to a UN estimate.

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