ANKARA (AA) – Twenty-eight municipalities in Turkey will come under new leadership within two weeks, casting off administrations guided by “terrorist group affiliates,” said Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu Friday.
"With the mandate given us by state decrees, the administration of 28 municipalities will not continue with terrorists, [or] instruction from Qandil, but with nationals who embrace this [Turkish] flag with its crescent and star," said Soylu, referring to the headquarters of the terrorist organization PKK in Iraq’s Qandil Mountains.
Speaking at a Police Academy ceremony in the capital Ankara, Soylu said the same applies to all terrorist organization-linked municipalities.
"Not only in the east and southeast, wherever in Turkey, this will happen to all municipalities that are involved in terror,” he said. “Not only the PKK, KCK, or Qandil terror, but also FETO terror."
Claims Thursday that two municipalities in Turkey’s southeast – Sur and Silvan, in Diyarbakir – were taken over by government-appointed trustees were later denied by the Diyarbakir Governor’s Office.
Soylu did not name the 28 municipalities in his address.
The PKK – listed as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the U.S., and EU – resumed its decades-old armed campaign in July 2015.
Since then, PKK terrorist attacks martyred more than 600 security personnel and also claimed the lives of many civilians, including women and children, while more than 7,000 PKK terrorists were killed in army operations.
The Fetullah Terrorist Organization (FETO), led by Fetullah Gulen, is the group blamed for the July 15 coup attempt in Turkey which left 240 people martyred and nearly 2,200 injured.
Gulen, who has lived in self-imposed exile in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania since 1997, is also accused of implementing a long-running campaign to overthrow the state through the infiltration of Turkish institutions, particularly the military, police, and judiciary, forming what is commonly known as the parallel state.