Adm. Bulent Bostanoglu monitor and direct military operations along the Syrian border, in Ankara, Turkey.
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The FSA captured al-Rai last week.
Turkey launched the incursion into Syria – the so-called Euphrates Shield operation – to back Syrian rebels in their fight to push IS out of the town of Jarablus and to limit the Syrian Kurdish forces’ advance west of the Euphrates River.
Cavusoglu added that a growing number of rocket attacks by the “Islamic State” (IS, ISIL, ISIS or Daesh) terrorist group after the military coup attempt in the country forced Turkey to launch a military peration in Syria.
USA officials have welcomed Turkish efforts to dislodge Islamic State from Syrian strongholds but voiced concern when Turkish troops engaged fighters aligned to the YPG, a force Washington sees as a valuable ally in battling jihadists.
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. Four others were wounded, it said.
Military wise, Turkish army-backed FSA brigades were able to gain control over seven villages to the north of Aleppo, Syria on Monday.
Turkey and its rebel allies now control a 90-km stretch of land on the Syrian side of the border and are pushing south. Ankara also wants to check the advance of US -allied Syrian Kurdish fighters in the region.
Ankara has said it is happy to host the refugees but President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has repeatedly mooted creating a safe zone inside Syria to house them, possibly in a brand new city.
“Currently, conflict lines are too insecure for numerous town’s displaced to return safely”, the United Nations humanitarian agency OCHA said in a report last week, referring to Jarablus which had a pre-war population of about 27,500 people.
Ankara would not object, Erdogan said.
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Daesh is another term for Islamic State, while the PYD is the political wing of Kurdish YPG militia, which Ankara says is an extension of Turkey’s outlawed PKK, a Kurdish militant group that is fighting for autonomy in Turkey’s southeast.
