Turkey's Erdogan, EU's Tusk Say they Discussed Syria 'Safe Zone'
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and EU head Donald Tusk said Monday they had discussed Ankara's controversial plan for a safe zone cleared of Islamic State jihadist fighters in northern Syria.
"The European Union is ready to take up all issues with Turkey so we also discussed a possible buffer zone in Syria," Tusk said after meeting Erdogan for talks in Brussels dominated by the migrant crisis and the Syrian conflict.
Western officials had previously cast doubt on the Turkish proposals for a no-fly "safe zone" in northern Syria where refugees could take shelter from the bloody conflict.
Critics say Turkey appears to be pushing the idea because it fears gains by Kurdish rebels along the border would bolster Kurds seeking their own homeland in eastern Turkey.
Erdogan, a strong opponent of Syrian President Bashar Assad, said the "root cause" of the refugee crisis was the "state-sponsored terrorism actually carried out by Assad himself."
"If we would like to resolve the refugee issue there are three things we have to do," he said.
"One is to focus on training and equipment. The second one is to declare a safe zone that would be protected from terrorism and the third is a no-fly zone," Erdogan said.
European Parliament chief Martin Schulz said after meeting Erdogan earlier that such a safe zone would need endorsement by the U.N. Security Council.
Russia said shortly after Tusk's remarks that it opposed a no-fly zone in Syria.
Tusk said he and Erdogan also discussed "the urgent need" to end the more than four-year-old war in Syria which has claimed some 250,000 lives and displaced half the country's population.
"We agreed that the solution cannot happen through having Russia allied with President Assad bombing opposition forces," Tusk said.
"We agree on the need to fight Daesh," he said, referring to the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State group that now controls large swathes of Syria and Iraq.
"In this context President Erdogan also updated me on the worrying news of Russian warplanes violating Turkish territory," the European Council president said.
Turkey, a NATO member, protested to Moscow after its F-16 jets intercepted a Russian fighter plane that violated its air space near the Syrian border over the weekend, forcing it to turn back.
In Brussels, NATO condemned Russian incursions into Turkish airspace as an "extreme danger" and demanded that Moscow halt all attacks against the Syrian opposition and civilians.
Source: Agence France Presse
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