By Nurat Uthman
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken began talks with Turkey’s top diplomat Friday after reassurances that Ankara would never allow any let-up in the fight against jihadists in Syria following the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad.
Blinken began meeting with Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan at 9:40 am (0640 GMT), a US official said.
He flew in to the Turkish capital late Thursday and met with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for more than an hour at the VIP lounge inside Ankara airport, a US official said.
During their talks, Erdogan said Turkey would never ease up in the fight against jihadists from the Islamist State (IS) group in Syria, despite its efforts to target a US-backed Kurdish group seen as key to containing the extremists.
“Turkey will never allow any weakness to arise in the fight against ISIS,” Erdogan told him, according to an overnight statement from his office.
Turkey, he said, would take “preventive measures against all terrorist organisations, primarily the PKK/PYD/YPG and ISIS (IS) terrorist organisations, operating in Syria and posing a threat to Turkey, primarily for its own national security”.
The YPG is a Kurdish force that makes up the bulk of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a US-backed group that spearheaded the offensive that defeated IS’s self-declared caliphate in Syria in 2019.
Ankara views the YPG and its political wing, the PYD, as an extension of the banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) that has led a decades-long insurgency against the Turkish state, effectively blacklisting the SDF as a terror outfit.
