U.S. pushing Turks to join anti-IS coalition

WASHINGTON — A team of top US officials has arrived in Ankara, Turkey for two days of talks in an attempt to prod the Turkish government into taking an active role in fighting the Islamist State group in northern Syria.

Retired US Marine Corps Gen. John Allen and Brett McGurk, the State Department’s deputy assistant secretary for near eastern affairs, are leading the team.

Despite deep disagreements between Washington and Ankara over issues like Turkey’s desire for Turk-led ‘no-fly’ zone over northern Syria, Secretary of State John Kerry said Wednesday that he is “absolutely confident” that the meetings will push the joint strategy forward, and “over the next hours, days the fullness of that strategy evolving and decisions being made about the Turks and others as to exactly what role they’re going to play.”

Allen is coming off a trip to Baghdad where he held meetings with influential Sunni politicians and tribal leaders in an attempt to get the Sunni population to rise up against fellow Sunnis in IS, who have taken over vast areas of northern and western Iraq.

The trip to Turkey is considered critical to the ongoing effort to convince the Turks to take more of an active role in pushing back the IS siege of the Syrian border town of Kobani, which is a key link in the resupply routes for the moderate forces battling Syria’s Assad regime and Islamist fighters.

At an event hosted by the International Institute for Strategic Studies on Wednesday, Assitant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs Derek Chollet warned that US airstrikes would only be giving limited relief to the Kurds who have fought off IS fighters for the past several weeks, repeating the Pentagon and the Obama administration’s contention that only competent local ground forces will be able to win the day on the battlefield in Syria and Iraq.

“We have tremendous capability but there is only so much you can do from the air alone.” Chollet said. “One of the challenges is we are not there on the ground.”

He said that despite the spotty record of Iraqi troops over the past several months in fighting IS, they still provide some critical capabilities that only a trained ground force can bring.

“That is the reason why we are seeking $500 million from our Congress to help build up a viable capable Syrian military opposition,” he said. “That’s an effort that we are slowly laying the groundwork for, we have to get the money before we can move out on that.”

Chollett also said that while the United States still isn’t ready to start sending lethal military equipment to Ukraine, as US officials continue to meet with their partners in Kiev, that kind of aid hasn’t been ruled out.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has been asking the United States to provide lethal assistance on top of the $116 million in food, military uniforms, body armor, night vision equipment, and other aid the US has provided. But “that is not something that we have decided to do at the moment, but what we are interested in doing right now is building a work program that may eventually get to that point,” Chollett said.

Nearby in the Baltic states, NATO and the United States have been strengthening alliances while deploying troops for “a robust program of rotational deployments, pre-positioned equipment [and] exercise programs to ensure that their capability is as robust as it can be” he said.

He warned that “we still have a lot of work to do in Europe, shoring up our central and Eastern European NATO allies.”