Turkey made its say listened to with Euphrates Shield op: Defense minister

Turkish Defense Minister Fikri Işık said that Turkey's say on Syria was being listened to thanks to the ongoing Euphrates Shield operation and that the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party's (PYD) plan to unite cantons had been excluded. 

Speaking to Hürriyet Daily News in Munich where he came to attend the Munich Security Conference, Işık also gave insights into his meeting with U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis on the sidelines of the NATO Defense Ministers meeting on Feb. 15-16. 

"We have for a long time been telling the U.S. that cooperating with PYD against Deash, working with a terrorist against another [terrorist], was wrong. We have been telling them that the problems this will cause will lead to a waste of time and an increase in the costs," said Işık, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). 

"At the beginning they did not care much. They listened to us out of courtesy but they were continuing on doing what they were doing. Now they listen and they respond," he said. 

"This happened by way of the Euphrates Shield operation. Maybe not Jarablus but the capturing of Dabiq made the U.S.' change their perception. They knew Dabiq's symbolical meaning for Deash and that Deash had located forces there," he said. [In Islamic eschatology, Dabiq is the place where the armies of Muslims led by the Mahdi (the Messiah) will fight against the "Roman" (or non-Muslim) armies led by the Daccal (anti-Christ or false Mahdi) just before the apocalypse.]

"The U.S. has thanked us many times for the Dabiq operation. Getting over the crisis of us downing a Russian jet and finally the al-Bab operation has changed the U.S.' perception," he said. 

"Because through this, firstly the actors...