MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 20th February, 2019) Damascus has always been engaged in a dialogue with the Syrian Kurds, who are part of Syrian society and are guaranteed equality under the nation's constitution, Bouthaina Shaaban, a political and media adviser to Syrian President Bashar Assad, told Sputnik on Tuesday.
Over the weekend media reported that Assad had called on Syria's Kurds to side with Damascus, stressing that only the Syrian government could protect them against a potential Turkish offensive as Washington looks to withdraw its troops from the region.
"The Kurds are part of the Syrian society, they are the Syrian people. Negotiations with the Kurdish side have been taking place since the very beginning [of the civil war], but there are some ... of them [Kurds] that depend on the US decision [to withdraw troops from Syria]. And that's part of the Kurds that we have problems with. As regards the Syrian Kurds, they are Syrians, they are equal before the law and constitution. We are always in dialogue with them," Shaaban said on the sidelines of the Valdai Discussion Club's middle East conference in Moscow.
In December, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced that the Turkish army was ready to launch an offensive against the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) on the eastern bank of the Euphrates River in Syria if the United States did not remove the Kurdish militia from there. However, after a phone conversation with US President Donald Trump, during which he informed his Turkish counterpart about his plan to pull out troops from Syria, Erdogan decided to postpone the military operation.
The YPG is a part of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, which controls large territories in northeast Syria. Ankara considers the YPG an affiliate of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, listed as a terrorist organization in Turkey.
