Former Secretary of State outrages Turkey
QAMISHLI, Syria (North Press) – Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo outraged Turkish government about information on a military operation by Ankara on northern Syria.
This came in a book by Pompeo titled “Never Give An Inch: Fighting for the America I Love”, where he noted to a meeting held between then US Vice President Mike Pence and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2019.
The book talks about how the former US President Donald Trump tried to convince the Turkish president to sign a ceasefire agreement in northern Syria in October 2019.
In October 2019, the Turkish forces and their affiliated armed opposition factions, also known as the Syrian National Army (SNA), launched the so-called “Peace Spring” military operation and occupied the city of Sere Kaniye (Ras al-Ain) in the north of Hasakah and the city of Tel Abyad in the north of Raqqa, north and northeast Syria. The operation also caused the displacement of about 300.000 of the original people of the area.
“What he says about Turkey is misinformation. I am being diplomatic. You could just call it plain lying,” said Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs Mevlut Cavusoglu in a joint press conference with his Thailand’s counterpart Don Pramudwinai in Ankara on Thursday.
Turkey’s presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin said that unlike what Pompeo claimed, Erdogan and Pence had been accompanied by himself and James Jeffrey, who was the US representative to Syria at the time. “Pence did not express any desire to include Pomeo in the talks,” Kalin said, describing it as an issue of the American delegation. “We learned much later that he had a meltdown outside.”
“I told my counterpart that we were going to break through the door — I was worried that Vice President Pence was being subjected to the same three-hour video of the 2016 coup that I had been forced to watch on my first visit to Turkey as CIA director in 2017,” Pompeo wrote.
In his book, Pompeo reflects on his visit to Ankara in 2017 as CIA chief, describing his mission as “breaking” it to the Turks that Washington had chosen to work with the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) rather than with the Turkish army to wipe the Islamic State (ISIS) from northern Syria.
Cavusoglu said it was “amazing” that Washington thought that the Turkish army did not have the capacity to defeat ISIS when Turkish forces had already recaptured chunks of territory from militant groups in northern Syria.
“Now came the diplomatic piece of breaking the news to the Turks. The meeting went poorly,” Pompeo said about his meeting with head of Turkish intelligence Hakan Fidan and Ibrahim Kalin.
“I’ve never seen such anger erupt so quickly in a room. Kalin and Fidan exploded and then left quickly,” he said, adding that though it had not been great for the bilateral relationship, the US had made “the right decision”.