U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken began talks with Turkey’s top diplomat Friday after reassurances that Ankara would never allow any let-up in the fight against rebels in Syria following the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad.
Blinken began meeting with Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan at 9:40 a.m., a U.S. official said.
He flew into the Turkish capital late Thursday and met with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for more than an hour at the VIP lounge inside Ankara airport, a U.S. official said.
During their talks, Erdogan said Turkey would never ease up in the fight against rebels from the Islamist State group in Syria, despite its efforts to target a U.S.-backed Kurdish group seen as key to containing the extremists.
“Turkey will never allow any weakness to arise in the fight against ISIS,” Erdogan told him, according to an overnight statement from his office.
Turkey, he said, would take “preventive measures against all terrorist organizations, primarily the PKK/PYD/YPG and ISIS (IS) terrorist organizations, operating in Syria and posing a threat to Turkey, primarily for its own national security.”
The YPG is a Kurdish force that makes up the bulk of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a U.S.-backed group that spearheaded the offensive that defeated IS’s self-declared caliphate in Syria in 2019.
Ankara views the YPG and its political wing, the PYD, as an extension of the banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) that has led a decadeslong insurgency against the Turkish state, effectively blacklisting the SDF as a terror outfit.
‘Critical’ role against IS
U.S. backing for the SDF has put it sharply at odds with Ankara.
As the Islamist-led rebels marched on Damascus, the SNA, a Turkish proxy force, began its own offensive against the SDF, raising concerns about the two NATO allies’ competing interests in Syria.
Turkey sees armed Kurdish forces so close to its southern border as a threat.
And while Washington has acknowledged its security concerns, Blinken said Thursday that the SDF was “critical” to preventing an IS resurgence.
“At a time when we want to see this transition … to a better way forward for Syria, part of that also has to be ensuring that ISIS doesn’t rear its ugly head again,” he said.
“Critical to making sure that doesn’t happen are the so-called SDF — the Syrian Democratic Forces,” he added.
