Turkish Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu revealed his country's grand hegemonistic ambition of expanding its territory beyond Turkey. "We are not only just Turkey, but also Damascus, Aleppo, Kirkuk, Jerusalem, Palestine, Makkah, and Madinah," Soylu said during a rally in Diyarbakir city, according to a video and translation posted on Twitter by the Nordic Monitor. "We are the grandchildren of a great civilization," the interior minister told his supporters. Diyarbakir is the largest city in Turkey's southeast, where Kurdish PKK fighters have fought an insurgency for more than three decades to press demands for Kurdish autonomy. Last October, 90 people were arrested over suspected links to PKK, with the main pro-Kurdish party decrying the arrests as a politically motivated crackdown. Some 94 of 102 municipalities in Kurdish-majority cities and towns are now administered by trustees, rather than their elected mayors. Authorities removed those mayors, elected in the last municipal elections in 2014, in the security crackdown that followed an attempted military coup in 2016. — Agencies
