Above all, the border had served as the main conduit for the foreign fighters who have swarmed to participate in the militants’ ambitious experiment in Islamic governance, formalised in 2014 into what the group’s leadership termed a caliphate.
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Two Turkish soldiers were martyred and five injured Tuesday in a Daesh attack in Syria’s Aleppo province, the military said, APA reports quoting Anadolu.
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said in remarks published on Wednesday by the daily Hurriyet that U.S. President Barack Obama had floated an idea of joint action with Turkey to capture Raqqa, the Syrian city that is Islamic State’s de facto capital.
The rebels – who are predominantly Syrian Arabs and Turkmen fighting under the banner of the Free Syrian Army – took charge of the frontier between Azaz and Jarablus after seizing 20 villages from the Sunni hard-line group, the Turkish military said in a statement.
The fatalities are the first of the Turkish operation inside Syria to be blamed on IS and Ankara’s biggest single loss of life in the offensive to date.
Washington and Ankara are ready to work together to push ISIS jihadists out of their self-declared Syrian capital of Raqqa, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Wednesday, revealing that his US counterpart Barack Obama floated the idea during their recent meeting in China.
Turkey views the YPG as an extension of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), an armed group which it considers a terrorist organization.
Ankara now wants worldwide support for an operation to take control of a rectangle of territory stretching into Syria, creating a buffer between two Kurdish-held cantons to the east and west and against ISIS to the south. But Kerry emerged alone to say a couple of issues still needed to be resolved and the two sides would resume talks on Monday.
On Sunday, ISIL fighters were expelled from their last positions along the Turkish-Syrian border, depriving the group of a key transit point for recruits and supplies.
Turkey’s state-run Anadolu agency reported the advance “has removed terror organisation Daesh’s (IS) physical contact with the Turkish border in northern Syria”. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad wants to fully recapture divided Aleppo, Syria’s largest city before the war.
Neither commented directly on the Turkish proposal, though both said they wanted to build cooperation in fighting terrorism in Syria.
The Syrian government has also strongly denounced Turkey’s incursion as a violation of its sovereignty. The Observatory said three people were killed. Advances by the insurgents in recent days have brought them to within 10 km (six miles) of government-controlled Hama, the Observatory and insurgents say.
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Information for this article was contributed by Bassem Mroue, Zeynep Bilginsoy, Albert Aji, Neyran Elden, Kathleen Hennessey, Josh Lederman, Bradley Klapper and Jim Heintz of The Associated Press; by Nick Wadhams and Angela Greiling Keane of Bloomberg News; and by Mark Landler of The New York Times.
