Turkey reached a milestone in the conflict over Sweden and Finland joining NATO during the visit of its Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu to Washington.

After meeting his American colleague Antony Blinken late Wednesday evening, he said negotiations with the American government on the purchase of the modernized version of the F-16 fighter jet were going well.

Rainer Herman

Editor in Politics.

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The government informed Congress that the delivery of the F-16 was important not only for Turkey but also for the United States.

Turkey is also making demands on Sweden and Finland in the conflict it triggered about NATO's northern expansion.

However, Washington is the main addressee of the Turkish leadership.

On the one hand, it is a thorn in her side that the United States is supplying the latest fighter jet from its production, the F-35, to Greece but not to Turkey.

Turkey had shot itself out of the development of the F-35 with the purchase of the Russian S-400 air defense system.

Washington backed the Kurds

Last October, Ankara therefore applied for the purchase of 40 modernized F-16 aircraft and the necessary components to modernize the 80 F-16 aircraft of the Turkish Air Force.

Defense Minister Hulusi Akar said this fighter jet is a good interim solution until Turkey develops its own TF-X fighter jet.

Ankara's second concern in Washington concerns the American attitude towards the Kurdish YPG militia in northern Syria.

All Turkish attempts to end cooperation between its NATO allies and the YPG have so far failed.

The YPG is the Syrian sister organization of the PKK, which is classified as a terrorist organization by both Turkey and most Western countries.

However, the YPG had proven to be a powerful partner in the fight against IS when Turkey was still turning a blind eye to Islamist extremists who were useful in the war against the Syrian regime.

In order not to work directly with the YPG, Washington engineered the establishment of the militia alliance SDF under the leadership of the YPG in 2015.

She played a key role in defeating IS.

Turkey sees the YPG as a threat to its security

Initially, the YPG and its political arm, the PYD, controlled the entire northern corridor of Syria, from the Syrian border with Iraq in the east to Afrin in the west.

Turkey saw this as a threat to its security, especially since the YPG was now equipped with Western weapons.

The Turkish army therefore first marched into Afrin in March 2018.

In October 2019, in an operation dubbed “Peace Spring,” they drove the YPG out of another 140-kilometer-wide corridor.

After that, Ankara declared Afrin and the newly occupied corridor to be "safe zones".

In the future, Syrian refugees from Turkey should be settled in them.

The Turkish campaign in Western countries to participate in the construction of houses for the refugees who have been returned has failed.

On the contrary, the United States even decided to exempt the areas controlled by the PYD/YPG from sanctions against Syria, allowing American companies to invest there.

This should strengthen the Kurds in their fight against the return of IS.