‘Turkey’s vice president has vowed revenge on Syrian forces after 33 Turkish soldiers were killed in an airstrike in the rebel-held Idlib province. Ankara previously said it had launched air and artillery strikes in retaliation.
Turkish Vice President Fuat Oktay unleashed a scathing verbal attack on Syrian President Bashar Assad and the forces loyal to Damascus shortly after a 6-hour marathon emergency security meeting chaired by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan concluded in Ankara in the early hours of Friday.
Oktay minced no words, referring to the Syrian leader as “the head of a terror state” who “would go down in history as a war criminal” in a written statement reported by Turkey’s Anadolu News Agency, adding that Damascus would “pay [a] heavy price” for what he called a “treacherous attack on Turkish troops.”
Earlier on Thursday, Erdogan’s press secretary Fahrettin Altun said Turkey has been retaliating to the attack on its soldiers by launching air and artillery strikes against Syrian positions. The media chief went so far as to compare the situation in Idlib with a genocide, the likes of “what happened in Rwanda and Bosnia.”
