Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am aware that the Government and the Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, in particular, are deeply concerned about what is happening in the Brexit negotiations. I do not wish in any sense to pay insufficient attention to that state of affairs. However, I am concerned that within the past week, the President of the United States, in a telephone conversation, effectively gave the green light to the President of Turkey to invade Syria. I will come back to what he did after that. Having made the call, a military operation commenced along the Turkish-Syrian border in the Kurdish areas of Syria. It appears that the Turkish military is using proxy forces - the Syrian Democratic Forces, as they were called - which include elements of al-Qaeda, to engage in ethnic cleansing and butchering of Kurds in a border strip along the Turkish border. I was horrified to see that a prominent female Kurdish politician was taken from her car and executed by these militants. The other day, to my horror, I saw on television two young men being executed by machine gun on the side of the road.

This ethnic cleansing seems to be deliberate and the Turkish Government seems intent on moving Sunni refugees in Turkey into a strip along the border and dispossessing and evicting the Kurdish people from the towns there. The civilised world must protest these developments. Ireland, in particular, as a non-aligned state which is not a member of NATO, has a duty to protest this barbarism.