Turkey says 2 of its soldiers killed in IS attack in Syria

Airstrikes by the USA -led coalition have killed a number of the group’s most prominent founding members and leaders.

The source said that Turkey earlier made a similar statement to North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.

The weekend gains follow a successful battle by Turkey’s military to seize Jarablus, which lies across the border from Gaziantep, a Turkish city of two million people that has been severely destabilized by the flow of foreign fighters entering and leaving Syria.

Turkey says such a “safe zone” would help stem the flood of Syrian refugees.

The operation, dubbed Euphrates Shield, marked Turkey’s largest incursion into Syria since the war began, and had two stated objectives: limit the territorial ambitions of Kurdish-led, US-backed forces to expand along the border from their territory in Syria’s northeast and clear IS from its positions south of Turkey’s border.

Yildirim on September 4 defended his country’s intervention in Syria, pointing to their long shared border.

That puts Turkey in firm control of a stretch of land it sees as a bulwark against the USA -backed Syrian Kurdish YPG militia.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in a joint press conference with US president Barack Obama in China that “our wish is that a terror corridor does not form on our southern border”.

In the view of Abdullah Agar, a security analyst and writer, Turkey is now engaged in a struggle for existence against terror groups as well as the powers behind them.

Turkey’s Prime Minister Binali Yildirim says government forces and Syrian rebels have completely expelled the Islamic State (IS) extremists from the Syrian-Turkish border. Further, Turkey contends that 75-year-old Fethullah Gulen, living in self-imposed exile since 1999 in the eastern USA state of Pennsylvania, orchestrated the coup, and had put pressure on the U.S. to send Gulen back to Turkey. The State Department behaves as if it really believes that war against IS can be separated from the other challenges in the region, whereas a successful policy needs to deal with the unresolved issues that allowed IS to flourish in the first place.

The development leaves about 250,000 people living in rebel-controlled parts of the city cut off from the outside world once again, and will raise new fears about a humanitarian crisis in Aleppo.

Fighting around Aleppo has recently cut supplies, power and water to almost 2 million people in both government- and rebel-held areas.

A string of bomb attacks hit across mostly government-controlled areas of Syria yesterday, killing several dozen people including at least 35 in President Bashar al-Assad’s coastal stronghold of Tartus, state media said.

State TV quoted an unnamed military official as saying that troops are now in full control of the military academies south of Aleppo and were “chasing the remnant of terrorists”. The Observatory confirmed an explosive device went off but had no casualty figures. “The whole areas are under complete siege”.

The onslaught, which targeted ISIS-held land, was backed by Syrian and Russian air strikes. “The U.S. Government must not be tethered to Turkey’s sinking ship”.

“Euphrates Shield has demonstrated the FSA could be successful when supported, making it a better fighting force against the IS than the PYD”, Akyol wrote.

“Obama wants to do some things together concerning Raqqa in particular”, Erdogan told reporters on his plane that arrived early on Tuesday, referring to Islamic State’s de facto capital.

“We received an outline but we are expecting an agreement on paper that can be implemented”, Kalin told NTV television.

“Currently, conflict lines are too insecure for numerous town’s displaced to return safely”, the United Nations humanitarian agency OCHA said in a report last week, referring to Jarablus which had a pre-war population of about 27,500 people.