Turkey slams BBC for ‘openly supporting terrorism’

The Turkish Foreign Ministry building in Ankara. (Photo: Today’s Zaman, Ali Ünal)

The Turkish Foreign Ministry on Friday accused the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) of supporting terrorism in its recent report on the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a group recognized as terrorist by European Union countries.

In a statement posted on its website, the Foreign Ministry said the report contained “propaganda material” for the PKK.
“Such a report on an organization that is recognized as a terrorist group by many countries including first and foremost the EU countries is open support of terrorism,” the statement said.
The BBC report, broadcast on Aug. 19, is based on a visit to a woman’s PKK training camp in the Kandil Mountains, where Yazidi and Kurdish women are trained to fight against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). It follows a Yazidi woman who escaped ISIL captivity and joined the PKK.
The Foreign Ministry said the report, which depicted a designated terrorist organization as an “innocent group fighting a terrorist group” and “encouraged recruitment in the PKK,” was “unacceptable” and “in violation of UN and EU resolutions” that ban encouraging and praising terrorism.
Turkey began pounding PKK targets in northern Iraq and Turkey on July 24 after the PKK killed two policemen, apparently in retaliation for a suicide bombing on July 20 that killed 33 pro-Kurdish activists and was blamed on ISIL. The PKK has stepped up its attacks on the security forces since then, with a settlement process launched in 2012 to resolve the Kurdish issue peacefully effectively being shelved.
The Foreign Ministry said the PKK has killed 64 people, injured 350 and kidnapped 16 over the past month.

The statement continued by saying that the “irresponsible and hypocritical” stance exemplified by the BBC report feeds terrorism and called on the British broadcaster to adopt the same editorial stance it took towards the IRA, which recently bombed a police station in Northern Ireland.
The PKK is designated as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and the EU, but a Syrian Kurdish group that is closely aligned with it, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), has emerged as a main force battling ISIL on the ground in Syria.
TODAY’S ZAMAN / ISTANBUL