After meeting for hours with Turkish leaders on Monday, the best Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel could say is that Ankara would do what it can to help against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
The Obama administration sees Turkey as one of 10 core countries in the coalition it is trying to build to fight the Islamist extremist group.
“Turkey has its specific concerns and issues,” Hagel told reporters. “They want to play roles and specific roles. They will play those. They need to determine those. That’s what we’re assessing now, where each of those countries can fit in, in their roles. All the roles that each will play are important. But that’s partly what I was talking to the leaders about today.”
He would not specify which roles were discussed, saying it was up to Turkish officials to announce when they have decided what to do.
Though Turkey is a NATO member and borders both Iraq and Syria — making it a key potential member of any coalition against the Islamist extremist group — the Islamist government is walking a tightrope between international pressure to join in fighting the Islamic State and its own concerns.
Hagel’s visit to Ankara for talks with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and other Turkish leaders comes on the heels of President Obama’s discussions with Erdogan on Friday on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Wales. Obama is scheduled to announce his strategy for dealing with the Islamic State on Wednesday, and administration officials have said building a coalition of nations to fight the group — especially Sunni Muslim nations such as Turkey — will be a key part of that effort.
Turkey is a major transit point for foreign fighters traveling in and out of Syria — a flow the U.S. and other nations want stopped. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told the official Anatolia news agency that Ankara had a list of 6,000 people who are banned from entering Turkey to keep them from joining terrorist groups.
The NATO ally also hosts a major U.S. airbase at Incirlik.
But Erdogan has turned Turkey in an increasingly Islamist direction under his Justice and Development Party, known by its Turkish initials AKP, and has raised concerns in Washington by supporting the overthrow of Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad and Hamas in Gaza.
Ankara also is concerned about the fate of some 49 Turkish diplomats and military personnel taken hostage by the Islamic State in Mosul, Iraq — the capital of the group’s self-styled caliphate. The group has been holding Consul General Ozturk Yilmaz, 18 consular employees and family members and 30 Turkish special forces soldiers hostage since a June 11 raid on the consulate. Their fate is not clear amid a media blackout on the topic.
“We are a NATO ally. We share the same principles and values with the West. But we have our … hostages,” one Turkish official told the Hurriyet daily on the condition of anonymity.
There also are 840,000 Syrian refugees in Turkey, according to the United Nations, the second-highest number after Lebanon.
And then there’s the delicate question of helping Iraq’s Kurds, who are on the front lines of the fight against the Islamic State, without encouraging them to seek independence. Turkey, with a large and restive Kurdish population of its own, has had a complicated relationship with the autonomous government of Iraqi Kurdistan.
Hagel said Turkish officials brought up concerns about the PKK, a Kurdish group that has fought a violent campaign against Ankara for autonomy. “But they didn’t indicate to me in any way that they saw the PKK as a — as a more significant threat to them than [the Islamic State],” he said. “But the concerns they have, as I said, not unlike many of our concerns about arming any group of individuals, are always legitimate. And that’s why we are so careful in who we provide armaments to.”
Cavusoglu stressed that point in his interview with Anatolia, saying the PKK should not receive weapons intended for Iraq’s Kurds.
