Turkey: Extensive fight against ISIS to start

The restrictions on travel to Turkey apply to an area of along Syria’s border that stretches from Adana, where Incirlik is located, east to Van and south to Ganziantep.

“Our means and our current level of effort are not aligned with our ends”, said Senate Armed Services Committee chairman John McCain, the Arizona Republican who himself flew combat missions in Vietnam.

Ankara and Washington could have been involved with tactics to deliver you discuss protect and get a category of United states.S.-trained Syrian rebels and…

Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of an Asean meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Mevlut Cavusoglu, the Turkish foreign minister, said the battle would begin soon, but did not elaborate.

“The US planes have begun arriving and soon we will launch a comprehensive fight against Daesh all together”, he said, using a pejorative Arabic acronym for IS, quoted by the official Anatolia news agency. Analyst Charles Lister follows rebel dynamics in northern Syria closely and says the crumbling of the U.S.-backed forces… “Otherwise it will be a breach of Syrian sovereignty”. Turkey’s aircraft will join the coalition’s bombing of Islamic State targets in Syria.

Iran and Russian Federation, meanwhile, have stood by Assad throughout the country’s four-year civil war, and seem unlikely to abandon him now.

“They say that the rebels cannot fight Assad [Syrian President Bashar al-Assad] because it’s not directive of the program”, Giglio says.

But major challenges remain.

Washington said on Tuesday it had indications some of the rebels trained by its military were captured by fighters from Al-Qaeda’s Syria wing, the Al-Nusra Front, underscoring the vulnerability of a group only deployed to the battlefield in recent weeks.

In addition to that, he explains, the US hasn’t been supplying the rebels with useful weapons and ammunition.

Turkish warplanes have also conducted attacks against targets of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in northern Iraq.

Turkish officials have suggested Ankara will step up its strikes against IS once US operations from Incirlik are in full swing.

Ankara is now planning a mini-coalition including regional countries Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Jordan, North Atlantic Treaty Organisation allies Britain and France as well as the United States to fight against IS, which it designated a terror group in 2013. On July 23, just three days before the images were captured, Islamic State militants fired across the border from the Syrian village of al-Raaee and traded fire with Turkish forces, resulting in the death of a Turkish soldier and a Syrian militant. “It has to be eliminated”, he said.

It is reported that up to two SAS squadrons of men, around 120 personnel in all, are operating inside the borders of Syria as part of Operation Shader, which aims to destroy equipment and munitions used by the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL).

Erdogan has said a “safe zone” created by pushing out Islamic State could allow 1.7 million refugees in Turkey to start going home.

Formally referred to as the New Syrian Pressure (NSF), the primary contingent of 54 fighters was educated by the U.S. army at a base in Turkey and despatched throughout the border into Northern Syria.