US Secretary of State John Kerry met Turkish leaders yesterday to try to win support for US-led military action against Islamic State, but Ankara’s reluctance to play a frontline role showed the difficulty of building a coalition for a regional war.
Kerry has been touring the Middle East to build support for President Barack Obama’s plan, announced on Wednesday, to strike both sides of the Syrian-Iraqi frontier to defeat Islamic State Sunni fighters that control swathes of both countries.
Turkey, a Nato member which shares long borders with both Syria and Iraq, is one of Washington’s main allies in the region but has so far conspicuously avoided committing to the new military campaign.
US officials downplayed hopes of persuading Ankara to take a significant role in any military involvement, saying the talks would focus on issues including Turkey’s efforts to stem the flow of foreign fighters crossing its territory and its role in providing humanitarian assistance.
The Ankara meetings came a day after Kerry signed up 10 Arab allies to a “coordinated military campaign” to fight the Sunni militants. But Turkey, which attended Thursday’s talks in Saudi Arabia, did not join the Arab states in signing up to the final communique.
A senior Turkish official said Ankara stayed out of the communique in part due to the sensitivity of efforts to free 46 Turkish hostages captured by Islamic State fighters in Iraq in June.
But pro-government Turkish media ran articles yesterday expressing broader scepticism over Obama’s plans.
US officials emphasised that Turkey could help in other ways, without pledging to join the nascent military coalition.
“The Turks have played an extraordinary role on humanitarian aspects of the situation and they are going to play and have been playing a pivotal role in our efforts to crack down on foreign fighter facilitation and counter terrorist finance,” a senior US State Department official said ahead of the talks.
“We consider our approach to the stability and security of Syria and Iraq and to the campaign against ISIL to be holistic and include lines of effort well beyond military action,” the official said, using the acronym for the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, the group’s former name.
Obama’s plan to fight Islamic State simultaneously in Iraq and Syria thrusts the United States directly into the midst of two different wars, in which nearly every country in the region has a stake, alliances have shifted and strategy is dominated by Islam’s 1,300-year-old rift between Sunnis and Shi’ites.
Islamic State is made up of Sunni militants, who are fighting against a Shi’ite-led government in Iraq and a government in Syria led by members of a Shi’ite offshoot sect. It also battles against rival Sunni Islamists and more moderate Sunni groups in Syria, and Kurds on both sides of the border.