Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has told Turkey it will pay a heavy price for backing rebels fighting to oust him, accusing it of harbouring “terrorists” along its border who would soon turn against their hosts.
In an interview with Turkey’s Halk TV yesterday, Assad called Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan “bigoted” and said Ankara was allowing terrorists to cross into Syria to attack the army and Syrian civilians.
“It is not possible to put terrorism in your pocket and use it as a card because it is like a scorpion which won’t hesitate to sting you at the first opportunity,” Assad said, according to a transcript from Halk TV, which is close to Turkey’s opposition.
“In the near future, these terrorists will have an impact on Turkey and Turkey will pay a heavy price for it.”
Turkey, which shares a 900-kilometre border with Syria and has Nato’s second largest deployable armed forces, is one of Assad’s fiercest critics and a staunch supporter of the opposition, although it denies arming the rebels.
It shelters about a quarter of the two million people who have fled Syria and has often seen the conflict spill across its frontier, responding in kind when mortars and shells fired from Syria have hit its soil.
It has also allowed rebel fighters to cross in and out of Syria but has grown alarmed, along with Western allies opposed to Assad, by divisions among their ranks and the deepening influence of radical Islamists in Syria.
Last month, the al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant seized Azaz, about five kilometres from the border with Turkey, and has repeatedly clashed with the local Northern Storm brigade since then.
“Right now, Syria is headed for a sectarian war,” Erdogan said in an interview on Turkish TV late on Thursday.
Turkey has bolstered its defences and sent additional troops to the border with Syria in recent weeks and its Parliament voted on Thursday to extend by a year a mandate authorising a military deployment to Syria if needed.
Assad accused Erdogan, whose AK Party has its roots in conservative Islamist politics, of a secta-rian agenda.
“Before the crisis, Erdogan had never mentioned reforms or democracy, he was never interested in these issues... Erdogan only wanted the Muslim Brotherhood to return to Syria, that was his main and core aim,” he said.
Erdogan’s government strongly denies any such agenda.
His aides point to his cultivation of good relations with Assad for years before the conflict and say Turkey does not see Syria’s Sunni Muslims and its Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shi’ism to which Assad belongs, as fixed blocs.
Assad said he had not yet decided whether to run in presidential elections next year because the situation on the ground was changing rapidly, adding that he would only put himself forward if Syrians wanted him to.