During his speech in the north-eastern province of Kars, where a joint Turkish-Azerbaijani military drill is taking place, the minister also boasted that, since 2016, Turkish border operations had prevented the creation of a corridor by terrorist groups in northern Syria.

Akar stressed that without Turkish forces protecting the locals from the alleged threat of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), the refugee flow would have been "considerable", the official Anadolu news agency reports him as saying.

The PKK is a Kurdish left-wing militant and political group based in Turkey and Iraq — the former considers the PKK a terrorist organization. The Democratic Union Party (PYD) is a Kurdish democratic confederalist political party established in Syria, considered one of the most important Kurdish opposition parties in the country and the YPG is its military wing.

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