A leading member of the terrorist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) has accused Turkey’s Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu of being engaged in efforts to aid armed groups in Syria that have been clashing with Syria’s Democratic Union Party (PYD), an offshoot of the PKK, the Taraf daily claimed on Friday.

“I’m well informed that Mr. Davutoğlu has been giving special attention to these forces for more than a year,” said Murat Karayılan, a member of the executive council of the Kurdistan Communities’ Union (KCK), an umbrella group for the PKK, according to Taraf.

Syria’s ethnic Kurdish minority, led by the PYD, gave signals about a month ago that in the absence of a central government in war-torn Syria it was planning to establish an autonomous administration to cater to the needs of locals in the northern part of the country. Now, some of the Islamist groups fighting the Syrian regime, such as the al-Qaeda-linked al-Nusra Front, have turned their weapons against the Kurds. Fighting between the PYD and the Islamist groups has continued since then.

Karayılan, who is also the head of the PKK’s armed wing, the People’s Defense Forces (HPG), said that the policy he attributed to Davutoğlu only makes sense if Kurds are seen as the enemy. He added that the attacks on Kurds in northern Syria are part of a plan to stop Kurds from getting stronger and obtaining power. The HPG, Karayılan said, has been reorganized to respond to the new situation. Reports say the HPG is now in a position to cooperate militarily with Peshmerga forces under Massoud Barzani, president of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq, and to Jalal Talabani, head of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and Iraq’s Kurdish president. Karayılan said the PKK is preparing to establish a professional army.

PYD head Saleh Muslim, who has been to Turkey twice recently, has said that weapons and ammunition continue to be transferred from Turkey to Syria and delivered to Arab fighters. According to Karayılan, Turkey and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) have set up an undeclared embargo on Kurds in Syria. He claimed that while Muslim was in Turkey, members of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) met in Gaziantep, a province in Turkey’s south bordering Syria. “There, they decided to participate in the attacks the al-Nusra Front has been carrying out against Kurds,” Karayılan said.

“Is it possible that such a meeting could take place independent of the Turkish state?” Karayılan said, questioning Turkey’s position on the Syria conflict. The rebels fighting the Assad regime have modern weapons like anti-aircraft missiles and artillery, and Karayılan is convinced that these arms come from Turkey. “What is 100 percent true for us is that these [weapons] arrived in Syria by way of Turkey,” he said.

In a written response to a parliamentary question submitted by Umut Oran, the deputy chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), Davutoğlu hinted that Turkey considers the Nusra Front a terrorist organization, describing al-Nusra as an extremist group. Davutoğlu added that al-Nusra is classified by the US and the UN as a terrorist group because of its connections with al-Qaeda.

In a press statement, Oran described Turkey’s indirect “recognition” of al-Nusra as a terrorist organization as a very important step taken rather late. Oran also argued that the foreign minister’s answers implicitly accepted that terrorists belonging to al-Nusra may have entered Syria via Turkey. Opposition parties in Turkey have harshly criticized the government for supporting opposition forces fighting the regime in Syria, which they say has involved Turkey in its southern neighbor’s problems.

The PYD presence in northern Syria is a source of concern in Turkey because of the group’s links with the terrorist PKK. Any steps toward autonomy by the PYD, Turkey fears, could fan the PKK’s hopes for an independent Kurdish state in Turkey. The government has been conducting peace talks with the PKK since the end of last year in a bid to resolve the country’s decades-old Kurdish problem.