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Turkey, U.S. agree differences won’t stop talks

Sides plan formal dialogue through working group to hold first meeting in March

By Carol Morello, The Washington Post
Published: February 16, 2018, 8:35pm

ANKARA, Turkey — The United States and Turkey agreed after marathon talks on Friday to a formal dialogue to resolve their differences over a Kurdish militia in Syria, averting a near collapse in relations, but without mending any of the deep fissures keeping them apart.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, after talks with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Foreign Minister Mehmet Cavusoglu, said a working group to tackle the differences will hold its first meeting by mid-March.

Tillerson’s main goal in Turkey was to calm waters roiled by two allies nearly at each other’s throats and he acknowledged how close they had come to a breakdown in relations.

“We find ourselves in a bit of crisis point in the relationship,” he said at a news conference.

“We’re not going to act alone any longer,” he added. “We’re not going to be the U.S. doing one thing and Turkey doing another. We’re going to act together from this point forward. We’re going to lock arms. We’re going to work through the issues that are causing difficulties for us and we’re going to resolve them.”

Despite his determined words, however, both Tillerson and Cavusoglu spent much of the news conference repeating positions both have held for months — and which have led to the downward spiral in relations and threats from Turkey.

Cavusoglu expressed Turkish anger that a cleric they suspect of being behind a 2016 attempted coup is living in Pennsylvania. Tillerson said the United States would look at any evidence Turkey presents, which in the past has been judged by courts to be insufficient for the extradition Turkey wants.

The United States in turn is unhappy over Turkey’s arresting thousands of its own citizens as well as Americans and Turkish employees of the U.S. Embassy and consulates that it says were just performing their jobs.

But the sour state of bilateral relations deteriorated even more rapidly in the last month after Turkey launched an offensive against a Kurdish militia backed by the United States in northern Syria. Turkey fears the Syrian Kurds will provide arms to Turkish Kurds who have been waging an armed struggle against the government.

Both the U.S. and Turkey consider the Kurdish group in Turkey, known as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, to be a terrorist group. But their allies in Syria are seen by the U.S. to be the most effective fighters in taking on the Islamic State militants.

The long-standing difference threatened to spill into the open when Erdogan warned that U.S. troops around the Syrian town of Manbij would feel the sting of an Ottoman slap if they got in the way of Turkey’s troops there.

It was unclear whether both sides walked away with the same understandings. Cavusoglu said Turkey expects U.S. troops in Manbij to withdraw east of the Euphrates. Tillerson said U.S. forces are present to ensure the town does not fall back into the hands of militants, but he was short on specifics, saying these had to be ironed out by the working group.

“We agreed our objectives are precisely the same,” he said, citing the destruction of Islamic State stragglers and stabilizing the country to allow the return home of refugees and people uprooted within the country.

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