Did Trump Give Erdogan License to Kill PKK Militants Inside Iraq?

Posted: May 24th, 2017

By Soner Cagaptay

Soner Cagaptay is the Beyer Family fellow and director of the Turkish Research Program at The Washington Institute. He has written extensively on U.S.-Turkish relations, Turkish domestic politics, and Turkish nationalism.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited Washington last week to meet with U.S. President Donald Trump. Despite budding tensions over the Trump administration’s decision to arm the Kurdish YPG (Peoples’ Protection Units) militia in Syria, which Erdogan considers to be a terrorist organization, the meeting largely went off without a hitch. The Cipher Brief’s Fritz Lodge spoke with Soner Cagaptay, Director of the Turkish Research Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and author of “The New Sultan,” about how we should read the result of this first meeting between the two leaders.

The Cipher Brief: What was your reaction to the to the meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan during his visit to Washington last week?

“The Cipher Brief has become the most popular outlet for former intelligence officers; no media outlet is even a close second to The Cipher Brief in terms of the number of articles published by formers.” —Sept. 2018, Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 62

Access all of The Cipher Brief’s national security-focused expert insight by becoming a Cipher Brief Subscriber+ Member.

Subscriber+