Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said: ‘Turkish aircraft carried out three strikes on IS positions in northwestern Aleppo province, killing nine and wounding 12.’. The operations came after the first major cross-border clashes between Turkey and Daesh militants on Thursday left one Turkish soldier and one militant dead, thrusting Turkey into an open conflict with the militants.
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In the Turkish village of Beylerbeyi on the Syria border, near the scene of Thursday’s clashes between the military and Daesh militants, a correspondent described the situation as peaceful.
It was the first exchange of gunfire between the Islamic State and Turkey.
The air strikes, which followed a phone conversation between Erdogan and US President Barack Obama on Wednesday, were accompanied by police raids across Turkey to detain hundreds of suspected militants, including from Kurdish groups. Although U.S. pilots have dropped most of the ordnance and have flown most of the sorties against ISIL targets, the United Kingdom Canada, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Bahrain, France, the Netherlands, and several other countries are participating in the airstrikes as well.
American officials said access to the base in southern Turkey, not far from IS strongholds across the border in Syria, would allow the U.S.to move more swiftly and nimbly against IS targets.
The state-run Anadolu news agency reported that a female member of the leftist Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party Front was killed during a raid in Istanbul.
Local media reported that helicopters and more than 5,000 officers, including special forces, were deployed in the operation. The group claims the men collaborated with IS in the bombing of a Kurdish activists’ group on Monday that killed 32 people.
” The Turkish government thinks only fighting ISIS is just dealing with the symptom and not the cause”, says Hakan Altinay, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute.
The airstrikes took placed as Turkish security forces launched raids across the country, rounding up scores of suspected Islamic State members as well as people affiliated with Kurdish separatist movements.
One police officer was shot and killed and a second wounded on Thursday in the mainly Kurdish city of Diyarbakir, security sources said. Tension between Turkey and the terrorist organization “Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant” continues to rise on the Turkey-Syria border.
Turkey had refrained from full participation in the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State since last summer, citing a range of concerns that the Obama administration’s strategy did not adequately address the complexity of the Syrian war.
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Hurriyet newspaper said the Turkish F-16s struck three targets close to the Turkish border, including two locations that the extremist group reportedly used as headquarters. Around half of the armoured vehicles that patrol Turkey’s borders are now along the Syrian frontier.
