President and Justice and Development (AK) Party Chairman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan delivered a speech at AK Party’s Parliamentary Group Meeting.

“Turkey is the country that has waged the biggest fight and scored the greatest achievements in the war on terror”

Erdoğan said: “Turkey is the country that has waged the biggest fight and sustained the gravest losses but, at the same time, scored the greatest achievements in the war on terror. The PKK organization has been attacking our state and people since 1984. Tens of thousands of innocent citizens of ours, including children of all ages ranging from those yet to be born to the ones still in their cradles along with their mothers as well as state employees, have been heinously massacred in these attacks. Thousands of members of security forces have died a martyr’s death in this struggle. The losses of terrorists are of course exponentially higher, though. Yet, the pain of our own losses is still fresh in our hearts.”

Erdoğan continued as follows: “Earlier, the ASALA terrorist organization had carried out about 100 attacks on our missions across the world and martyrized nearly 40 Turkish diplomats. Likewise, we experienced tremendous sufferings in terror incidents throughout the 1970s. Unfortunately, this long and highly costly process of anti-terror fight of Turkey’s has been viewed as a handy tool by those who have designs over our country instead of being appreciated.”

“We saw that we had to paddle our own canoe since the countries we deemed ally sided wıth the PKK/YPG”

Underlining that Turkey has adopted it as a principle to resolve every issue through diplomacy, dialogue and negotiations based on mutual respect and understanding, Erdoğan stated: “As such, we explored all of these avenues regarding the threats emanating from Syria, too. They resorted to every means, including FETO and PKK, to associate Turkey, the country most targeted by DAESH, with this very same organization. We responded in as open and sincere a manner as even the most ignorant people can understand. They tried to turn our fight against organizations into a matter of human rights. We responded as kindly, yet again. They even attempted to level accusations on the refugee issue against Turkey, which single-handedly shoulders the burden of 4 million refugees. We, yet again, responded without compromising our stance. They overtly worked to form a PKK/YPG corridor along our southern borders first by the hands of DAESH and, when it failed, by the hands of PKK/YPG. Then we saw that we had to paddle our own canoe since the countries we deemed ally sided with PKK/YPG, not with us.” (ILKHA)