Kirby said Washington wants the pause to continue so all members of a USA -led coalition can focus on defeating Islamic State militants.
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Earlier last week, Turkish military crossed into Syrian border with an aim to fight the ISIS, however, the forces ended up fighting Kurdish fighters of the People’s Protection Units (YPG) during the weekend.
Turkey’s minister of European Union affairs dismisses claims that a cease-fire has been reached with Kurdish rebels in northern Syria.
Since the start of the campaign, the Turkish army has said it has bombarded dozens of targets that it says were held by the Kurdish YPG militia, a powerful force in the SDF.
The Spokesman for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told newsmen that Kurdish militia will remain a target for Turkey until they move east of the Euphrates River.
Turkey recently initiated Operation Euphrates Shield, a cross-border military offensive in which Turkish tanks and soldiers entered Syria to secure Turkey’s southern border in response to Islamic State attacks. Washington has appealed on both Ankara and Syrian Kurds to stop fighting each other.
In comments made to the state-run Anadolu news agency on Wednesday, EU Minister Omer Celik says, “Turkey is a sovereign state, it is a legitimate state”.
Turkish presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin said the goal was to drive Islamic State from a 90 km strip of land along the border with Turkey, which has been buffeted by a spate of bombings blamed on the group that have killed scores of people. Turkey says the group is an arm of Turkey’s outlawed PKK. “It is out of the question for the Turkish Republic to have any kind of a tie, an agreement. with this organization”.
Since then, the Turkish army with its allies have pushed further south, seizing a string of villages in areas controlled by militias loyal to the Kurdish-backed SDF, which drove Islamic State out of the city of Manbij this month with US help.
“Kurdish-Syrian fighters delivered the bodies after they were taken to a field hospital when they fell in battle”. Erdogan will hold discussions on the issue during the G-20 summit in China, he added. Turkish-backed forces are mostly focusing on attacking a Kurdish-dominated alliance with Arab fighters called the Syrian Democratic Forces, south of the town.
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