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BEIRUT: US and Turkish troops are “illegal invader” forces on Syrian territory and Syria will “deal with” them, a top adviser to President Bashar Assad said on Tuesday.
Bouthaina Shaaban also said in a television interview that Damascus would not give up on the northern city of Raqqa, which was liberated from Daesh last month by the US-backed, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
“Turkey today is a colonizer country, its forces on our soil are illegal, just as the American forces are on our soil illegally,” she told Lebanese channel Al-Mayadeen.
“We will deal with this issue as we deal with any illegal invader force on our lands,” she said, without elaborating.
Assad’s forces, helped by Russian air power and Iran-backed militias, have managed to reestablish control over most of Syria over the past two years.
The US and Turkey are backing various opposition groups opposed to both Assad and to Daesh. Turkey has started setting up observation points in Idlib province in northwest Syria under a deal with Assad’s allies, Russia and Iran.
The US-led coalition battling Daesh in Syria has repeatedly said it does not seek to fight Assad’s forces, though Washington and Ankara both want the president to step down.
The SDF has said Raqqa will be part of a decentralized “federal Syria” and hopes for a new phase of negotiations that will shore up Kurdish autonomy in northern Syria, but last Friday a senior Iranian official said Syrian regime forces would advance soon to take the city.
“Everything is up to the Syrians and to discussions between Syrians, and there cannot be discussion on the division or cutting up of a part of the country or on so-called federalism,” Shaaban said.
She added that what happened in Iraqi Kurdistan “should be a lesson” to the SDF, referring to Iraq’s Kurdish leaders who suffered a major blow when the central government in Baghdad — backed by Iran and Turkey — retaliated against them for holding an independence referendum last month.
Shaaban also said comments by the Syrian foreign minister in September, when he said Damascus was open to negotiations with the Kurds over their demand for autonomy within Syria’s borders, had been misinterpreted.
“I don’t think any government can discuss with any group when it comes to the topic of the country’s unity,” she said.
After defeating Daesh in Raqqa, the SDP said the people of the majority Arab city and surrounding province would decide their own future “within the framework of a decentralized, federal, democratic Syria.”
In a declaration formally announcing Raqqa’s liberation from Islamic State after four months of battles, the SDF pledged “to protect the frontiers of the province against all external threats,” and to hand control to a civil council from the city.
Kurdish-led authorities in other parts of the north said they want a federal system that would allow regions to rule themselves without central control by the center.
The Kurdish-led autonomy plans in Syria have advanced as diplomacy has failed to make any progress toward a political solution to the six-year-long war.
Assad, who is fast regaining territory in Syria’s most populous eastern regions with Iranian and Russian military support, has repeatedly said the state will recover all Syria.