Turkish opposition blames Erdogan for Turks killed in Iraq
Turkey's biggest opposition party has blamed the president for the deaths of 13 Turkish hostages in Iraqi Kurdistan over the weekend.
The leader of Turkey’s main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) said President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is to blame for the deaths of 13 Turkish hostages that were being held by Kurdish militants in Iraqi Kurdistan. In a scathing address before the Turkish Parliament, Kemal Kilicdaroglu said he had five questions for Erdogan. One was, “What have you done for this nation’s sons who were being held since 2015 by the terrorist organization?”
Kilicdaroglu went on to lambast the president in his Feb. 16 speech for failing to enlist the help of civil society organizations that had previously mediated to free Turkish citizens being held by the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). “Did it never occur to you to call on them?” he asked.
Kilicdaroglu reminded Erdogan of his admission the day before that the military operation in Iraqi Kurdistan’s Gare region launched Feb. 10 was to rescue the hostages but had ended in failure. “Normally someone should take responsibility and resign. You go to rescue hostages and they die. The person responsible for our 13 martyrs is Recep Tayyip Erdogan,” he said.
Kilicdaroglu’s salvos indicate that the opposition refuses to be intimidated by the government’s labeling of those critical of the mission as traitors or by the jailing of more than 700 members of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) on Feb. 15. The government accuses the HDP of links to the PKK and has prosecuted hundreds of its members on thinly supported evidence that they are members of the militant group. A video prepared Erdogan’s communications directorate called “The Origins of HDP-PKK Relations” and posted Feb. 14 by the state-run Anadolu News Agency purports to prove their alleged links.
