International
Drop row and face common enemy, Obama urges Turkey, Russia
U.S President Barack Obama on Tuesday advised Turkey and Russia to end their row over the downing of a Russian airliner and focus instead on the real adversary- ISIS.
“I want to be very clear: Turkey is a Nato ally. The US supports Turkish rights to defend itself and its airspace and its territory,” Obama said after meeting his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in Paris.
“We all have a common enemy and that is ISIL, and I want to make sure we focus on that threat,” Obama said, using an alternative name for ISIS.
Obama’s comments is coming after his defence secretary, Ash Carter, said the US would increasingly rely on special operations forces to battle ISIS fighters in Iraq and Syria, where the extremists have seized huge swaths of territory including oil fields used to fund their activities.
Read also: Syrian market hit by deadly Russian airstrike
The US president believes Russia would soon change track in Syria and back a political solution to the bloody conflict after years of supporting long-time ally President Bashar al-Assad, who Washington insists must step down.
Speaking at the Climate Summit in Paris, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg urged Turkey and Russia to “find a way to avoid a repeat of the jet incident, which threatens to scupper efforts to forge a common front against ISIS in the wake of attacks in Paris claimed by the group that left 130 dead.”
Turkish President Erdoğan, who has demanded that Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, provide evidence to back up charges Ankara trades in oil with ISIS, said he too was keen to move on. “We are always willing to resort to the diplomatic language … we want to avoid the tensions,” he said.
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