Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Sunday that Turkey’s ballistic missile test last month has scared Athens, before warning that Ankara will not stand idly by if Greece continues to arm its islands in the Aegean.
Turkey fired a locally made short-range ballistic missile dubbed Tayfun (Typhoon) over the Black Sea. The missile can reach targets at a distance of 561 kilometers (349 miles) in 456 seconds, according to Turkey.
«You say ‘Tayfun’ and they are afraid, because they say it can reach Athens, and it certainly could,» Erdogan said Sunday in remarks reported by Bloomberg.
«And it could if you don’t keep calm,» he warned Athens, «if you try to send weapons you got from the U.S. to the islands.» In that case «a country like Turkey is not going to go around picking pears: it will do something».
Turkey is increasingly frustrated by what it sees as a growing Greek military buildup on islands off its coast and Western military support for NATO member Greece, with which Ankara has had territorial disputes for decades.
These frictions have intensified in recent years as Turkey mobilized its navy to claim rights to potential hydrocarbon resources in the eastern Mediterranean.
Greece has repeatedly called on Turkey to stop challenging its sovereignty over the Dodecanese, a group of islands off the Turkish coast that includes Rhodes and Kos, which Italy ceded to Greece after World War II.
