Turkey not to pull troops out of Mosul, Erdogan says

Turkey will not pull its troops out of northern Iraq, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Thursday.

“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.

Also read: Turkey halts deployment of troops in Iraq, but will not withdraw

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.

Iraqi PM: No solution without Turkish troop withdrawal

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 US and the Iraqi Kurdish Regional Government would meet on December 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.