State Department Spokesperson Heather Nauert made the remarks at a daily press briefing after a question about a meeting between Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Turkey’s Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Ankara last week.<\/p>\n
Nauert said Tillerson and Erdogan made a commitment to one another during the meeting and both Washington and Ankara recognized that the two countries had not worked well enough together over the past few years.<\/p>\n
“As NATO allies and partners who both share in the interest and the shared goal of defeating ISIS [Daesh], we are now going to start to work together in a better fashion so that we can achieve those mutual goals,” she added.<\/p>\n
Turning to a question about Turkey’s ongoing military operation in Syria, Nauert emphasized that the U.S. is not equipping anyone in Afrin and U.S. forces are not operating there.<\/p>\n
“So our knowledge in terms of what is going on in Afrin is somewhat limited,” she noted.<\/p>\n
On Jan. 20, Turkey launched Operation Olive Branch to clear PYD\/PKK and Daesh terrorists from Afrin in northwestern Syria.<\/p>\n
According to the Turkish General Staff, the operation aims to establish security and stability along Turkey\u2019s borders and the region as well as protect Syrians from terrorist oppression and cruelty.<\/p>\n
The operation is being carried out under the framework of Turkey’s rights based on international law, UN Security Council resolutions, its self-defense rights under the UN Charter and respect for Syria’s territorial integrity, it said.<\/p>\n
The military also said only terror targets were being destroyed and that “utmost care” was being taken to not harm civilians.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The U.S. said it will start working together with Turkey \u201cin a better fashion\u201d so the two countries can achieve mutual goals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":60099,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[80,63,118,101,14],"tags":[77866,3219,77332,77182,6022],"class_list":["post-60097","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-breaking-news","category-daily","category-hot","category-politics","category-world","tag-operation-olive-branch","tag-pkk","tag-pyd","tag-turkey","tag-us"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60097","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60097"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60097\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}