Turkey says it can fight Islamic State. Its record is spotty.
Foreign recruits of Islamic State, eager to migrate to the territory the militant group had carved out in Iraq and Syria, would prepare their staples — a phone, a solar charger, a few garments — before buying round-trip plane tickets .Once having landed there, they continued on to towns dotting the 566-mile border Turkey shares with Syria, crossing over for a new life among those who shared their fanatical vision.
But Ankara is also moving to excise what it calls Kurdish terrorists of the People’s Protection Units, or YPG, which it sees as the Syrian offshoot of a banned Kurdish separatist group it fights at home, but which had become the United States’ top Syrian partner against Islamic State. Also in play is the fate of Islamic State detainees held in Kurdish-run prisons and camps, numbering an estimated 11,000 to 12,500 fighters and more than 60,000 family members. In the chaos, nearly 800 of them escaped Sunday from a camp near the Kurdish-run city of Ain Issa during an air barrage by Turkish forces. It followed a similar incident a day earlier, when five fighters escaped in Qamishli and others attempted to do so at another detention camp, Kurdish authorities said.
“For Turkey it’s the YPG first and ISIS maybe second,” he said in a phone interview Saturday. “Turkey will achieve its military objectives, but those objectives don’t actually include much about ISIS.”“The fact of the matter is that Turkey has never considered countering ISIS to be of utmost importance to its national security or its interests in Syria,” Heras said.
Even though an estimated 40,000 foreign fighters crossed into Syria, along with weapons and explosives, Brett McGurk, Trump’s former envoy for countering Islamic State, said in a post on Twitter on Wednesday, “Turkey refused repeated and detailed requests to seal its side of the border with U.S. help and assistance.”
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told reporters Sunday that Turkey had blocked 70,000 people and deported about 70,000 suspected of terrorist links from entering the country.
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