By Simon Lewis and Huseyin Hayatsever
ANKARA (Reuters) – U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Turkish foreign minister Hakan Fidan discussed on Friday the need for continued efforts to counter any resurgence of Islamic State in Syria following the fall of Bashar-al Assad.
“Our countries worked very hard and gave a lot over many years to ensure the elimination of the territorial caliphate of ISIS, to ensure that threat doesn’t rear its head again, and it’s imperative that we keep at those efforts,” Blinken said alongside Fidan after they met in Ankara.
Talks also focused on a critical aspect of establishing stability in Syria – clashes in the north of the country between U.S.-backed Kurdish forces and Turkish-backed rebels.
Fidan said after the meeting that Turkey’s “priority in Syria is to ensure stability…as soon as possible, to prevent terrorism from gaining ground and to prevent Islamic State and the PKK from dominating there”.
“We discussed in detail what we can do about these, what our common concerns are, and what our common solutions should be,” he said.
NATO allies Washington and Ankara supported Syrian rebels during the 13-year civil war, but their interests clashed when it came to one of the rebel factions – the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces.
The SDF is the main ally in a U.S. coalition against the Islamic State militants. It is spearheaded by the People’s Protection Units (YPG), which Ankara sees as an extension of Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants that it outlaws and who have fought the Turkish state for 40 years.
Blinken, who met Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan late on Thursday, also said that there was broad agreement on what Turkey and the U.S. would like to see in Syria after Assad’s fall.
Earlier this week, Turkish-backed forces seized the northern city of Manbij from the U.S.-backed SDF, which then headed east of the Euphrates River. A Syrian opposition source told Reuters the U.S. and Turkey had reached an agreement on the withdrawal.
Neither Blinken nor Fidan made any reference to any agreement between Turkey-backed Syrian forces and the SDF.
(Reporting by Simon Lewis; Editing by Jonathan Spicer and Angus MacSwan)
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