Meanwhile, US President Barack Obama sought to fix a rift with Turkey, expressing his wholehearted support for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
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Erdogan said he had agreed with President Barack Obama on the sidelines of the G20 meeting in China to do “what is necessary” to drive IS out of Raqa.
The Anadolu news agency reported Sunday that Turkey-backed Free Syrian Army rebels have cleared the area between the northern Syrian towns of Azaz and Jarablus.
Ankara now wants global support for an operation to take control of a rectangle of territory stretching about 40 km into Syria, creating a buffer between two Kurdish-held cantons to the east and west and against Islamic State to the south.
“Obama wants to do some things together concerning Raqqa in particular”, Erdogan told reporters on his plane that arrived early on Tuesday, referring to Islamic State’s de facto capital.
Turkish-backed forces clashed with YPG fighters in the initial stages of the two-week old Turkish incursion into Syria, but have since shifted their focus onto territory held by Islamic State and captured a string of villages.
Ankara sees the Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its armed wing the People’s Protection Units (YPG) as the Syrian wing of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which Turkey lists as a terrorist organisation.
“But at this stage we have to show our presence in the region”.
“We stated that would not be a problem from our perspective”.
The Observatory said the twin blasts killed 35 people, including an army colonel, and injured dozens more. Further, Turkey contends that 75-year-old Fethullah Gulen, living in self-imposed exile since 1999 in the eastern USA state of Pennsylvania, orchestrated the coup, and had put pressure on the U.S. to send Gulen back to Turkey.
Near-simultaneous bombings claimed by the Islamic State group struck in and around strongholds of the Syrian government and Kurdish troops Monday, killing at least 48 people in a wave of attacks that came a day after the militants lost a vital link to the outside world along the Syrian-Turkish border.
Commentators believe a major reason behind Ankara’s decision to put boots on the ground in Syria was the prospect of a PYD-controlled corridor along its southern border that would eventually lead to the establishment of a Kurdish statelet.
“We do not have the chance to take a backward step”.
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Turkey had blamed the death of one soldier on August 28 in a similar attack on Kurdish militia.
