Erdogan says external powers aim to divide Turkey using terror groups

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that the PKK and FETO terrorist organisations were being used to create insecurity in Turkey.

Speaking at the closing event of a student program organised by the Directorate of Religious Affairs at Zeytinburnu Culture and Art Center in Istanbul, Turkey on Saturday Erdogan said: " Now you see Syria, you see Iraq but do not forget that they [external powers] have same agenda for Turkey. I hope our nation will not give them this opportunity."

He did not name the external powers to whom he was referring.

Later on, in his speech Erdogan focused on PKK alone saying that the terrorist organisation which claims to being representative of Kurds in Turkey kills its own people.

"They say: ‘We are representatives of Kurdish people'. They lie… they urged people to take to the streets as soon as they got a little bit success in June 7 [2015] elections, and they caused 53 people to be killed," Erdogan said.

"Who were those killed? All of them were my Kurdish citizens. What about the killers? They were also Kurdish. Weren't you the representatives of Kurdish people?" he added.

The president also said the "separatist" terror group targeted children more by "stealing our dreams and tearing apart their lives".

He noted the PKK was primarily launching attacks to schools, dormitories and teachers in the country's southeastern cities.

He said the terror group was breaking the ties of children with education and religion in order to turn them into slaves of its ideology.

"It is obvious that the purpose of the organisation is to cut ties of our children in [Turkey's southeastern] region with both the school and the mosque, to turn them into slaves, servants and robots of their own heretical ideology.

"Because they know that terrorism or terrorists cannot find shelter in mosques."

The PKK - listed as a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the US and the EU -- resumed its armed campaign against Turkey in July 2015.

Since then, it has been responsible for the deaths of some 1,200 Turkish security personnel and civilians, including a number of women and children.