Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and top US Republican Senator Lindsey Graham were at a White House meeting Wednesday, according to media reports.
Axios website quoted three sources familiar with the meeting held in the Oval Office between Erdogan and his US counterpart Donald Trump in the presence of five Republican senators who are the most critical of the Turkish attack on Kurdish fighters in northeast Syria last October, quoted as saying that Erdogan came to the meeting with the iPad “His own video was broadcast to the audience showing elements of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
Senator Rick Scott, who attended the meeting, confirmed that the video, which took about three minutes, did not make any of the attendees change his position, according to the Associated Press.
According to Axios, after the video, Graham went to Erdogan to ask, “Do you want me to ask the Kurds to record another video of what you did?”
According to four sources familiar with the site, then a verbal argument broke out between Erdogan and Graham, and one of the sources, who attended the meeting, revealed that the Turkish president objected to the US Senator described the process of “peace spring” as an invasion, while Graham refuted Erdogan’s statement that Ankara is fighting “IS”.
Graham himself confirmed in a telephone interview, according to the site, an altercation between him and Erdogan in the Oval Office, saying: “The Turkish version says that they did more to defeat ISIS, but I strongly rejected this, and informed Turkey that more than ten thousand members of SDF, most of them Kurds, suffered, killed and injured during the war against ISIS, and America won’t forget it and won’t abandon them.
