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Turkish reluctance shows difficulty building U.S. alliance against Islamic State

12 September 2014 20:27 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Secretary of State John Kerry met Turkish leaders on Friday to try to win support for U.S.-led military action against Islamic State, but Ankara's reluctance to play a frontline role showed the difficulty of building a coalition for a regional war, APA reports quoting Reuters.

Kerry has been touring the Middle East to build support for President Barack Obama's plan, announced on Wednesday, to strike both sides of the Syrian-Iraqi frontier to defeat Islamic State Sunni fighters that control swathes of both countries.

Turkey, a NATO member which shares long borders with both Syria and Iraq, is one of Washington's main allies in the region but has so far conspicuously avoided committing to the new military campaign.

U.S. officials downplayed hopes of persuading Ankara to take a significant role in any military involvement, saying the talks would focus on issues including Turkey's efforts to stem the flow of foreign fighters crossing its territory and its role in providing humanitarian assistance.

The Ankara meetings came a day after Kerry signed up 10 Arab allies to a "coordinated military campaign" to fight the Sunni militants. But Turkey, which attended Thursday's talks in Saudi Arabia, did not join the Arab states in signing up to the final communique.

A senior Turkish official said Ankara stayed out of the communique in part due to the sensitivity of efforts to free 46 Turkish hostages captured by Islamic State fighters in Iraq in June. But pro-government Turkish media ran articles on Friday expressing broader scepticism over Obama's plans.

U.S. officials emphasized that Turkey could help in other ways, without pledging to join the nascent military coalition.

"The Turks have played an extraordinary role on humanitarian aspects of the situation ... and they are going to play and have been playing a pivotal role in our efforts to crack down on foreign fighter facilitation and counter terrorist finance," a senior U.S. State Department official said ahead of the talks.

"We consider our approach to the stability and security of Syria and Iraq and to the campaign against ISIL to be holistic and include lines of effort well beyond military action," the official said, using the acronym for the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, the group's former name.