by Itunuoluwa Adebo

Turkey has warned the US, Wednesday that the decision to arm Kurdish forces fighting Islamic State in Syria could end up hurting Washington, and accused its NATO ally of siding with terrorists.

The warning came a week before President Tayyip Erdogan is due in Washington for his first meeting with  President Trump, who approved the arms supply to support a campaign to retake the Syrian city of Raqqa from Islamic State. Turkey views the YPG as the Syrian extension of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has fought an insurgency in southeast Turkey since 1984 and  considered a terrorist group by the US, Turkey and Europe.

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Erdogan told a news conference in Ankara, “We want to believe that our allies will prefer to side with us, not with a terrorist organization,”, saying he would convey Turkey’s stance to Trump next week and at a NATO summit later this month. He said he hoped that recently taken decisions would be changed by the time he visits the United States.

Earlier, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim told reporters the U.S. failure to consider Turkey’s sensitivities “will surely have consequences and will yield a negative result for the U.S. as well”.

The United States regards the YPG as a valuable partner in the fight against Islamic State militants in northern Syria. Washington says that arming the Kurdish forces is necessary to recapturing Raqqa, Islamic State’s de facto capital in Syria and a hub for planning attacks against the West.

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Weapons supplied to the YPG have in the past fallen into PKK hands, said Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu. He told a televised news conference “Both the PKK and YPG are terrorist organizations and they are no different apart from their names,”. “Every weapon seized by them is a threat to Turkey.”

The Pentagon said on Tuesday it was aware of concerns in Turkey, which has given vital support to a U.S.-led campaign against Islamic State insurgents in Syria and Iraq.