Erdogan said he told Obama “it would not be a problem for us”, media quoted him as saying.
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Turkey launched an unprecedented operation inside Syria on August 24.
The operation took place in tandem with an attack by a suicide bomber on Turkish-backed rebels in the area, the organization said via the Telegram messaging app.
Ankara sees the opportunity for cooperation with the USA as a chance to kill two birds with one stone that will both hit Islamic State (IS formerly ISIS/ISIL) and Kurdish fighters, who they also consider terrorists.
“Obama wants to do some things together concerning Raqqa in particular”, Erdogan told reporters, referring to Isis’ de facto capital.
The US State Department would not confirm the details of Mr Erdogan’s statement, but an official said it was important that “local forces” were involved in the fight to deliver “a lasting defeat” to IS. “We wouldn’t consider anything before that as formal passage”, a spokesman at the governor’s office for Gaziantep province, which lies across the border from Jarabulus, said.
“I said: “Our soldiers should come together and discuss, then what is necessary will be done”, Mr Erdogan added.
The Kurdish YPG militia is a key partner of the US-led coalition against ISIL, and has recaptured large swaths of territory in Syria from the group. The Turkish military also denied killing six YPG fighters in a cross-border artillery attack.
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.
The Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Wednesday that Moscow has “grave concern about the advance of the Turkish troops and armed groups of the Syrian opposition it supports further into Syrian territory”. But there was no immediate comment from United States officials.
Turkey, meanwhile, has been sending more military hardware south. “If we take a backward step terror groups like Daesh, PKK, PYD and YPG will settle there”, he said.
His comments came after two volatile weeks around the Syrian-Turkish border.
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“What Turkey focuses and insists on is that instead of exclusively the YPG forces, the operations must be conducted, as the core of the operatives, by the local people of the region, instead of the YPG”, he said in an interview.
