Turkey’s foreign minister said Friday that President Donald Trump agreed to no longer arm Syrian Kurdish fighters during a call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
CBS reported that Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said: “Mr. Trump clearly stated that he had given clear instructions and that the YPG [a Kurdish Syrian militia] won’t be given arms and that this nonsense should have ended a long time ago.”
Trump tweeted prior to his call with Erdogan that they will be talking about “bringing peace to the mess that I inherited in the Middle East.”
“I will get it all done, but what a mistake, in lives and dollars (6 trillion), to be there in the first place!” Trump wrote.
The White House did not immediately respond to a press inquiry about whether Cavusoglu’s comments were accurate.
Turkey, a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), considers YPG to be a terrorist organization due to their affiliation with rebels in Turkey. The U.S. had been arming the YPG in its ongoing efforts to combat both the Syrian regime and the Islamic State in the Syrian Civil War.