Mina Öztürk, who was the first female Turkish foreign minister to receive a master’s degree from the University of Oxford, in Oxfordshire, described the “sensationalist media” of US government officials as “incoherent and absurd”.
In a report and a series of radio and television broadcasts she said “what is happening right now is ridiculous”.
“This is just another example of the insipid and illogical media coverage of this conflict and these US-led interventions in the Middle East,” Mrs Öztürk told the BBC on Monday after the Turkish foreign minister met the White House, the UN and Britain under an implicit invitation.
“No one who understands the region has been surprised by the actions of the US,” she added. “Turkey needs the US with a special connection. It is the first state in the region.”
“What is also surprising is how fast and dramatically things have turned out,” she said in an apparent reference to the US action in Syria but also referring to last month’s US diplomatic push into northern Iraq.
She said the US action against al-Fursan and their local allies only strengthened “the sense of threat to Turkey itself” as well as Iran’s influence in the Turkish-occupied zone of Ayn al-Arab in northern Syria.
She said Turkey was not only at risk from Isis but also from Kurdish separatism. “In the north, there is a deep, ongoing conflict between three groups. And now [in Syria] there is another very serious dispute between Kurdish and Assad supporters in the northeast,” she said.
At the same time, Erdoğan repeated that he did not want the Kurds to gain a statelet in Syria. But said that the Kurdish areas were “very important and important for Turkey”, in his criticism of what he called US-led “interference” in Syria as well as in eastern and southern Turkey.
The Foreign Minister said Turkey was “completely opposed” to attempts to “displace” Syrian president Bashar al-Assad from power there.
It is unclear what role the US will play in the new operation. Asked by the BBC why the US was taking such drastic, provocative action, the Foreign Minister replied: “We are working on the ground, and we are working with the US partners, but we are the first, and we will take more. You cannot have this kind of intervention without the