Turkey’s newly elected City of Agri Mayor Sirri Sakik, who is Kurdish, continues to make scandalous statements against Kazım Karabekir—the commander of the Eastern Army in the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I—, and these statements have caused quite a fuss in the country.

This time Sakik claimed, on the air of CNN Turk, that he does not want Karabekir’s statue to remain in Agri, since he knows the real history.

The Kurdish mayor recalled that the statues of the Turkish military personnel who had massacred the Kurds in the 1930s are placed in Downtown Agri, and added that these statues, together with that of Karabekir, will be removed from the city streets.    

Sakik also recalled the words spoken to Karabekir by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Republic of Turkey, and with respect to the Armenian Genocide.

“See what Ataturk said to Karabekir Pasha in connection with the events in 1915: ‘You have done villainy against the Armenians!’ Yes, that’s what he said,” Sirri Sakik said on air.