Former prosecutor and UN investigator Carla del Ponte on Saturday said Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan should be investigated and indicted for war crimes over his country’s military operation in northeast Syria targeting Kurdish forces.
Turkey’s intervention in Syria is a violation of international law, which had reignited the conflict in the war-torn country, Reuters quoted del Ponte, a former member of the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria, as saying.
Turkey launched its cross-border offensive into neighbouring Syria on October 9, aiming to clear the region of the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), a group Ankara sees as a threat due to its links to Kurdish separatists on its soil.
Turkey is also looking to repatriate millions of Syrian refugees in the safe zone to be created in the region.
“For Erdoğan to be able to invade Syrian territory to destroy the Kurds is unbelievable,” del Ponte, a former Swiss attorney general who prosecuted war crimes in Rwanda and former Yugoslavia, said.
“An investigation should be opened into him and he should be charged with war crimes. He should not be allowed to get away with this scot free,” Reuters quoted del Ponte as telling Swiss newspaper Schweiz am Wochenende in an interview.
Turkey last week halted the military operation under a U.S.-brokered ceasefire, a move that was followed by a negotiation with Moscow for Syrian border guards and Russian military police to clear the YPG from within 30 km (19 miles) of the Syrian-Turkish frontier.
Turkish and Russian forces on Tuesday will start to patrol a narrower, 10-km strip of land in northeast Syria, where U.S. troops had been deployed for years alongside Kurdish forces fighting the Islamic State (ISIS).
Ankara has come under criticism from NATO allies over its offensive citing the operation’s damage on the fight against ISIS.
European nations have been reluctant to confront Turkey over its actions after Erdoğan threatened to “open the gates” for refugees to head to Europe, del Ponte said.
“Erdoğan has the refugees as a bargaining chip,” the former UN investigator said.
The Turkish president has repeatedly threatened to release millions of immigrants into Europe if the EU does not support his plans for a safe zone in Syria.
Turkey is currently home to 3.6 million Syrian refugees.