Sweden assured Turkey on Wednesday (05.25.2022) that it does not deliver money and weapons to terrorist groups, at a time when Ankara is threatening to block the Scandinavian country’s entry into NATO for allegedly supporting Kurdish groups.
“Obviously we don’t send money to terrorist organizations and we don’t send weapons either,” Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson told a news conference in Stockholm.
Turkey, a member of the Atlantic alliance since 1952, demands the extradition of people who are in Swedish territory and who it describes as “terrorists” of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and its Syrian YPG branch.
The Turkish government also accuses Stockholm of giving $376 million in aid to the PKK and the YPG and supplying them with weapons, “in particular anti-tank weapons and drones.”
Turkey is also calling for the lifting of the Swedish embargo on arms exports to the country, in place since the Turkish offensive in northern Syria in October 2019.
Last week, Sweden and Finland submitted their bids to become NATO members, leaving behind decades of military non-alignment, all in the wake of the war in Ukraine.
afp/reuters/ap /rr
