Europe

Europe

Turkey not to pull troops out of Mosul, Erdogan says

10 December 2015 20:52 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Turkey will not pull its troops out of northern Iraq, Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Thursday, APA reports quoting Anadolu agency.

"Turkish troops in Mosul are not there as combatants, they are trainers," Erdogan said. "Their numbers may vary depending on the size of Kurdish peshmerga troops."

"It is out of the question, for now, to pull them out," he said.

Erdogan's remarks came at a press conference Thursday after he met Bosnian and Croatian members of the tripartite presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bakir Izetbegovic and Dragan Covic, respectively.

The recent deployment of Turkish military troops to Bashiqa, near Mosul, caused a diplomatic spat between Ankara and Baghdad.

However, Erdogan reiterated that Turkey's presence in northern Iraq was not new. He said that, since 2014, Ankara has been training peshmerga forces -- the Iraqi Kurdish Regional Government's army -- following a request from Mosul’s governor.

Erdogan has also announced that Turkey, the U.S. and the Iraqi Kurdish Regional Government would meet on Dec. 21 to discuss the regional issue.

The announcement came a day after the leader of Iraq’s Kurdish region, Massoud Barzani, paid an official visit to Ankara to discuss the fight against terrorism. The two leaders had stressed the significance of cooperation to ensure stability in the region, according to Turkish presidency sources.