Exclusive: Turkey holds up NATO military plans over Syria dispute - sources
Are you 'brain-dead'? Turkey's Erdogan raps Macron before NATO summitBRUSSELS (Reuters) - Turkey is refusing to back a NATO defense plan for the Baltics and Poland until the alliance offers Ankara more political support for its fight against Kurdish YPG militia in northern Syria, four senior alliance sources said.
Ankara has told its NATO envoy not to sign off on the plan and is taking a tough line in meetings and in private conversations, demanding the alliance recognize the YPG as terrorists in the formal wording, the sources said.
The troubles with NATO seems to be pilling up. Alongside Macron calling NATO brain dead and Erdoğan responding with calling him brain dead, an under-reported development is happening. Recently, Turkey basically vetoed a security plan that covered the Baltics in response to NATO's stance on Turkey's own security concerns.ISTANBUL/PARIS (Reuters) - Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Friday that Emmanuel Macron’s warning that NATO was dying reflects a “sick and shallow” understanding, telling the French president “you should check whether you are brain dead”.
This latest development have been reported fairly widely in Turkey. The twist that they focused on was that the development mentioned above came after USA vetoes an other security plan that labeled YPG/PYD/PKK as a threat to Turkey.
The fact that NATO countries acts against Turkey's security interests is nothing new, nor it is a secret. USA have been housing a Turkish cleric for decades, who is known to have a large following, with a business empire, who is on tape telling his followers to remain secretive till they have the power to take over the Turkish government.
On a larger scale, the veiled support coming from other NATO states to PKK for decades, despite labeling them as a terrorist organization, though only after the said group conducted violent attacks in their own soil, and the current open support to YPG, which at least USA's own institutions on record labeling it as the Syrian branch of PKK, doesn't exactly show that NATO is interested in Turkey's security.
There will be a NATO summit in a few weeks that will certainly have heated arguments with Macron, Trump and Erdoğan playing their own tunes. So, with NATO's double standards, what's the real point of it all? After all, the real reason NATO was formed, Russia, could take over Crimea in the end. What's the need for NATO if all it will used to do is to serve USA's needs?